The World Asunder Read online

  My face came up slowly.

  He leaned forward to touch my shoulder. “This is tough duty, but we have to explore this a little while it’s fresh, and I do have to control my intuitions with a bit of logic. You’ll agree that deciding what to include and what to eliminate is scientifically important I’d like for you to start by commenting professionally on the following hypothesis: that all these experiences have been purely my own mental fantasizing, not in any way substantial except for what they may tell about my own mind; that insofar as you or even also that driver-mechanic share them in whole or in part it was merely telepathic reception of my mental broadcasting.”

  His hand had left my shoulder, but acutely I remembered that it had been there; I didn’t know whether this diversion which he had provided was intentionally that or merely his detective-beagling impulse, but either way I was grateful. My head must have gone down again, for his male feet were again in my field....

  I tried being hard to the feet “Look, admittedly I’m hooked on the kinds of hysterias that produce multiple personalities. But I have to confess that I am seeing a bit of this in you, Dio.” Now I looked him in the face: “Can you take this?”

  He nodded, teeth sheathed. I considered him: he could take it.

  "Very early,” I reminded him, "you confessed that you weren’t entirely satisfied with your own personality, you’d like to be more handsome and graceful; The first fantasy featured fire, which is a standard hysterical symbol. Your Kali was Same-topped; I admit that you must have stolen the Halloran-image from my mind, but you did couple his handsome face with your own body. In the just-now fantasy, you began it with a weirdly fearsome anxiety-figure, and you reacted into hot driving rage which almost got me raped, but at once you rejected the rape and the rage, whereupon you found yourself directionless on a misty moor. Out of this you settled for hard, slow upward slogging toward a mountain-top blue flame, which had to mean intellect or intelligence or lucid mentality at a nearly unattainable level, calling upon you to risk a fall into an abyss; and closely coupled with this climax was a fissioning into two personalities, one of which became Kali the Enemy. By the way, Kali is the name of a goddess: female.”

  “I know. Creation-and-destruction. Maybe a coincidence.”

  “Maybe. All right. It can be hypothesized that you have a personality split, that this Kali-image is your projection of the better self you’d like to be. Perhaps in the fantasies you are subconsciously trying to satisfy yourself that you as Kali, and therefore you alone and nobody else, won your Esther away from you.”

  I paused, a little breathless, concentrating on the feet. He was silent. My eyes came up to his face. He was studying my face; his teeth were not sheathed, but neither was he smiling.

  He said presently, “That is very good, Dr. Vogel. It is also full of holes. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Like that anxiety and guilt are also ingredients in other types of mental disturbances that I don’t seem to have. And a couple of other things that are pretty shaky evidence. And a few little things in the mountain-climbing fantasy which were liquidly slid over by you: for instance, like the redhead up ahead of me whose tall figure seemed more like your Halloran than like Kali, and that he not I was the one who fissioned after attaining to the Blue Flame, and that one of him rose aloft while the other, which was presumably his own rejected ingredients, toppled into the abyss. Or that having red hair was never one of my self-idealizations, I just wanted to be tail and handsome, probably with black hair, which I have now. Well; and then, don’t we have to infer that the Kali who climbed out of the abyss was the reject of Halloran? Only with my dinky body, which I did once reject but don’t anymore, and which may be a conjoint you-me symbolization of what smallened the Halloran-soul and what smallened mine.”

  My mouth was open to agree, but he was still going. “Now tell me, Lilith: why would I then attack Kali? Have I done that—or do I want to do that, en route to some blue flame which isn’t Esther? And if my self-reconstruction has strengthened me so that I am now stronger than he, how could he throw me? And when I fell toward that cave-mouth, what were all those bubbling-out sail ships?”

  And now his silence was definitely awaiting my response. But all I could think of to say was: “Right.”

  “So we aren’t quite ready yet to eliminate the notion of queerly real interference in our lives, not quite ready to scratch it all off as my own mental twistiness.”

  I inhaled, and exhaled, and told him: “Right.”

  Studying his quarter-absorbed Scotch, he commented, 'Two martinis at that pub, one gin at my apartment, two wines and a cognac with dinner—this makes the seventh round, not counting a little cheating I did up above. What do you think, Doctor?”

  “You look practically sober, Inspector. Bedraggled, bruised, maybe oiled a little, but basically sober.” (In those days, “basically” wasn’t a cliche.) “If a guy is drunk, Dr. Vogel, how can he tell?”

  ‘Take me. Do I look drunk?”

  “To me who may be drunk, you look sober. Fairly sheveled for a near-rapee, and sober.”

  “Soberly I listen to a reformed almost-rapist.”

  “I put it to you as a hypothesis that this Kali exists. That he is not your Halloran, but is not unconnected with your Halloran, and is not unconnected with me either. When he stole Esther, he was flaming-high; but if he inspired her to put her note on the allusive rope and leave in the note a cue-omission, maybe he as well as she wants me to follow and find. He played tricks involving an Esther-image with my car: maybe a reminder to follow and find. Just now he threw me off the platform, which suggests intent to murder me; but his face was degenerately deformed, and at the end he pled with me to unify him. Only, look: if he is objectively trying to control me, why does he have to deal in fantasy-projected symbols? Why doesn’t he come right through and announce to me what he is and what he wants?”

  I was biting my lips almost painfully, worrying about who this Kali might be with his decaying Burk-face. I managed: “Sometimes a guy or gal has a need for something, and can’t come right out and announce it, but despite himself he expresses it in symbols—”

  Dio frowned down. “You are saying that—somewhere, out there, in there, up there, down there—some guy in deep trouble is trying to tell me, I'm drowning, help me.’ ”

  I sat shuddering. Because of course I knew who it had to be.

  He tossed off his liquor and set the glass on the carpet I did likewise. I began to feel a little better, then—well, not better exactly, but readier to sleep. I glanced at my wrist-watch and grinned, “Hey man, it’s after two! And you must be worse pooped than I am—”

  He gazed at me. Silence. I did feel generally sober, but perhaps all those drinks were creating a climate or an aura or something....

  I looked at the floating platform. “I—don’t think you should sleep up there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Want to sleep over there, then?”

  “Not really.”

  Room-darkness was relieved by residual moonlight. Apart in my big double bed, we watched each other sleepily, he on his left side, I on my right. He was a wonderful hard wiry little dark guy, friendly, sympathetic, honest, ultimately incapable of the atrocity called rape even in a fantasy. Seduction of an evidently responsible woman, yes; whore-rental, maybe sometimes; rape, no—it’s great sadistic sport for the totally egotistical or maniacal, but dirty pool for a guy who respects other people. Had he completed his rape of me, even though in his mind I was Esther, I respected him enough to have accepted it as necessary self-catharsis; but he hadn’t because inwardly he couldn’t, with me or with Esther or with any other woman. With that reflection, my peony-garden remembrance of Burk Halloran grew vivid-poignant; and then it receded in favor of Dio, who was here and quiet and battered. ...

  He told me, “I like it in here with you.”

  I answered, “I like it in here with you.”

  Some inches away from me, he reach
ed over and put his right hand on my bare upper left arm. Liking this, knowing how it would probably go now, I brought up my right arm from under me and laid the hand on his right hand.

  He told me, “I have no intention of using you. I just like you.”

  “Perhaps you should kiss me good night, and we’ll both go to sleep.”

  He brought his head over and kissed my lips lightly; my lips responded lightly. Then he pillowed his head close beside mine.

  For sure the kiss was in quiet light love, mutually. After a moment, my feet were on his feet. And now there was only one way for us. I hoped it would be slow and prolonged and delicious and honest It was.

  When I returned from the bathroom, he was sitting up in bed, holding two very small glasses of Scotch. “That makes seven and a half,” I commented, joining him and taking mine. “Drinks, I mean.” Blessed be He, how comfortable can you get with another human?

  He was nosing his. “I know now where I am going. I’d like to have you with me, but you’ll have to judge.”

  It put an edge on the comfort, but the memory of the wholeness lingered whole. I gibed, “Fine time to be thinking! Now I understand how it was with Esther.”

  He chuckled, “Well, yes—” Then turning seriously to me and claiming my shoulder: “Tonight isn’t over, you know.” I sipped, comfort renewed, edge accepted: this was the guy I liked, in his place I would have been doing the same, I wouldn’t have him different. I told him, “Believe me, Lilith is all purry. Keep thinking, it’s fine; when you finish thinking, that’s fine too.”

  “Good girl. I don’t feel at all hurried now, we can sleep late or whatever in the morning, but—what’s your thought about Paris, tomorrow?”

  My eyes widened. “Mon-ey.”

  “I have an American Express card, the account is CIA. Also a passport. How about your passport?”

  “I did a theater-quickie in London last year. Nothing that goes into my handbag ever leaves there. Why Paris?”

  Releasing my shoulder, he gave worried attention to the liquor. “Again, I don’t know. I’ve been rechecking all the fantasies, and Paris or even France doesn’t come out of them anywhere, except one fantasy-reference to Blois—but the conviction is clear, so one of two things is true: either I have subliminally noticed some bit of evidence pointing to Paris, or else Kali is calling from Paris.”

  I gripped his left shoulder with both hands. “You don’t suppose the bastard is watching us?”

  His grin was wicked. “Perhaps he wants a lesson in Kamasutra?”

  I, prim: “I have this funny feeling that he may get it”

  Part Two

  JUNE 2002

  REM, as most readers know, means Remote Earth Mobility. This names a device which Will blow any selected continental area off the face of the earth, an action generating seismic stresses which could easily break up the planet. Three nations have it operational now: the United States, the U.S.S.R., and China. Smaller nations are known to be in experimental stages with it. The REM Device reduces prior horrors like H-bombs to the relative status of strategic weapons in limited war.

  The topic is so grave that understatement is the only sensible kind of language for it. To understate: we urge our Presidency and our Congress to avoid playing diplomatic or local politics with the current REM Talks, which may lead to a REM Treaty. Again to understate: all three REM nations would value such a treaty.

  —Editorial, The New York Times-Herald, 2002

  Lovely, lovely RP Fleet-Nation! Delicate-deft, sturdy-romantic concept! What national official, what diplomat, indeed what artist can restrain himself from kissing RP on both cheeks and extending to the fleet every favor? With RP, instead of going luridly down into disaster, our world just might sail chuckling into the peace of permanent understanding and creative delight!

  —Canard Cassé in Aux Étoiles, 1999

  To conclude this brief, absolutely nothing about Guru Kali tastes honestly Oriental, and even his rituals and his teachings have an introspectively Western flavor.

  Taking this and other grounds for suspicion into account, I enjoin all members of the fleet, officers and crews, to place personal surveillance of Kali somewhere on their several agendas, and to report any observation no matter how trivial it may seem. Many other concerns are momentarily more pressing for all of us; but as a matter of rear-guard attention, watch Kali and report —Commodore Mallory in a précis to the RP Fleet 2001

  6.

  Some of the craft composing the fleet were primarily sail-powered, with auxiliary engines used only in difficult situations. The other craft, still using sail normally, were large enough, and light enough in design, to mount powerful and extremely fast skimmer engines and downjets and stem-jets and maneuvering sidejets; when this type of boat had first become commercially practical a generation earlier, it had been called “hovercraft”; but the combination of sails and skimmers in a single hull was sophisticated because of the keel requirement for sailing; and this difficulty had been conquered by the development of a two-layered sliding keel, which, on activation, rolled upward into the hull walls as separate plies on laminated sections, presenting a fairly flat jet-ported bottom to the surface of the sea. Fleet discipline, founded on a philosophy of leisurely travel for the route’s sake, called for sails only and always on open sea and large lakes under Condition Green, except that screws or skimmers could be used for delicate river-or harbor-navigation or when the individual Ship-Condition had to be Amber or Red; otherwise, only when most unusually the Fleet-Commander would call a Fleet-Condition Amber or Red could the auxiliary engines and skimmer-power and (if Red) one other capability be brought into play.

  The fleet was known internally and externally as RP, and collectively it enjoyed the status of Free-Floating Independent Nation under an early act by the World Assembly, which had succeeded the United Nations. The speculations as to the meaning of the initials RP added to the low-key glamor of this fleet, whose craft were enthusiastically welcomed or serenely hosted or grudgingly semi-accepted in almost any port of call.

  Once In a long while, Condition Green was so very green that captains and even the commodore felt free to hit some port for pleasure purposes only. One such occasion in June 2002 brought Rourke and Chloris and Zeno to Fishermen’s Cove.

  The flagship Ishtar and the frigate Us'ns, both under sail, made rendezvous in the bay off Fishermen’s Cove soon after 1800 hours (ships’ bells were still used, but only for aesthetic reasons). Almost instantly after the (rangling) noise of anchor chains ended, dories were simultaneously dropped off both ships.

  Aboard the Ishtar, Commodore Rourke Mallory paused beside the starboard rail, grinned faring the quarterdeck in semidress navy-blue weskit and powder-blue trousers and cravat and white shirt but capless with his thick white hair awry, tossed the quarterdeck a soft salute, and stepped into the little elevator-kiosk, which dropped him three meters to the sea-surface dory-hatch. There he was welcomed aboard, with informality and a fine-toothed smile, by the fulsome blonde dory commander, Lieutenant Cassie Wozniak. The two-person crew (Wozniak and a male senior petty officer) hove to with electric switches, and the dory burbled happily toward the cove dock with quiet merriment in her compressed-air bubble-wake.

  Against the dock, Mallory waited quietly in the dory, chatting with Cassie, while the petty officer mounted the dock and went in to check on reservations. He returned to announce that Co-Captains Metropoulos and Doxidoras had already checked in and awaited the commodore in the penthouse room. (The Us’ns was the only co-captained ship in the fleet) “Expected,” baritone-chortled the commodore: “less protocol, they move faster.” He kissed Wozniak full in the mouth, accepted a hand-up from the petty officer (while Cassie devotedly watched him upward), exchanged this time a sharp salute with the petty officer (both smiling friendship), and loped into the inn.

  He found Co-Captains Chloris Doxidoras and Zeno Metropoulos of the frigate Us’ns sitting drinking on the door edge of the innermost floor-level doubl
e bed in the penthouse room, watching for the commodore. Almost simultaneously: “Hi Rourke. Hi Rourke. Hi Chloris, hi Zeno.” Mallory skirted the foot of the outermost bed, sat on its inner side with his left knee touching Zeno’s right and his right knee touching Chloris’s left, reached to his right for the bourbon and ice and a glass on the between-beds table, sloshed it straight on the rocks, sipped, murmured, “Jesus God. Peace!”

  These three had known each other for a quarter-century. Chloris was long, lean, rawboned, precisely and crisply rakish, with chestnut hair and a clipped alto voice; judging age by skin-and-muscle tone and metabolic energy, you’d call her a nifty forty-five. Zeno was longer, more muscularly lean, just as rawboned, sleepily acquiescent until something hit him wrong and then dangerously stubborn-hard, with long fine chestnut hair and a common-baritone drawl; age on the same evidence, maybe forty-five again. You’d call Rourke an energetic sixty and recognize him as being still combatively or sexually dangerous but endlessly trustworthy when trust was won; his figure was hard-lean for his age, his complexion ruddy-fair, his hands flexibly expressive, his middle-blue eyes and his middle-wide mouth equally facile for hardness or for smiling; his voice was middle-baritone but not at all ordinary because of its liquidly expressive resonance, although the voice rarely rose and the diction was easy. When the three were standing together (which was not now), Rourke had to look slightly down at woman-tall Chloris and definitely upward at two-meter Zeno.

  Rourke now demanded, “Which beds are whose?”

  “Yours,” Chloris asserted, pointing upward at the floating penthouse-platform. “It’s a cross between—among—an upper berth, a high place, and a hammock. Not for me!”

  “Chloris has three phobias,” Zeno adjudicated: “bertho-, aero-, and swingo-.”