Day of Truth Read online

  Mark Chaos began to change during and after the war, but the change was very gradual. Chaos was largely immune to the whims of the world and untouched by guilt or sorrow. The conclusion of the war did not affect him emotionally to the degree it affected many of the Beasts, but it did inspire him to run away. It forced him to assign his mind to the single, simple goal of getting him home again.

  But his home world of Aquila proved an astonishing elusive destination. Malfunctioning computers and storms in space carried him into the Time Gap. His efforts to escape in his unreliable ship led him to world after world of the Devil’s

  Tresses—the name which early travelers had given to the stars of the Time Gap.

  He landed on the black star in time to see the end of its decaying civilization, and watched the world plunge into the fading sun when its machines could no longer sustain the tight orbit.

  He found the immortal child of one of Adam December’s more adventurous contemporaries, an unsuccessful, abandoned experiment. The child was of great size and extreme hostility. All attempts to kill it somehow failed, but Chaos and most of his crew escaped.

  In a third solar system he found the worlds of Aetema and Hyla. On Aetema, he spoke to the Mother of a subterranean race of tunnel dwellers. On Hyla, he made direct contact with Heljanita’s toys, lost most of his men, and would undoubtedly have been killed himself had it not been for the intervention of Darkscar’s companion.

  He was taken to Despair, where he met Darkscar in person. The crooked wheel had caused severe damage to his health, and he was forced to remain on Despair for a considerable length of time. During this time, he resisted Dark-scar’s efforts to enlist his help in the impending conflict with Heljanita. He was at first impressed by Darkscar but later was repelled by the frog people: the handless race which Darkscar had made to colonize a great river in the twilight zone of the planet. He met Darkscar’s collection and was confronted with people whose dreams he had destroyed and whose deaths he had caused. For the first time he realized that he had no adequate reasons to offer himself, let alone excuses to offer them. The discovery did not lead to an attack of conscience as Darkscar had hoped, but only to a greater degree of self-involvement.

  His vital need to return to Aquila became magnified into an obsession. He was still running away.

  He took off from Despair in one of Darkscar’s ships. More storms in space, and a duel with another ship, presumably Heljanita’s, left him again with damaged computers. He was forced to pilot the ship while navigating by sight. This involved looking directly into hyperspace, something which had long been held to be impossible or at least incompatible with sanity. He remained sane, but at last a change in his identity took place. The illness which had been the legacy of the crooked wheel returned and more besides.

  In hyperspace, he met illusions and dangers which might have been illusions. The only thing of which he was certain was a contact with the mind of an alien being, a complex being that was not even alive in any sense he understood. It had many dimensions, and a face which was directly involved with the substance of its thought. Its expressions were a direct communication of whatever was in. its mind. If he could have read the expressions, he could have known the creature to an extent to which he could never have known another man.

  Finally he set his ship down on a mist-shrouded world, following a beacon which turned, tragically, into a trap. His ship was smashed in a deep abyss, its high-omega apparatus completely wrecked. The sole inhabitant of die planet, a girl named Calypso, had no intention of letting him go again. He was condemned to stay alone with her madness for seven years.

  She looked after him as well as she was able, but he never showed any signs of recovering from his renewed illness. The disease was more of the mind than of the body, and there was no recovery available on Calypso’s world. His face was transfigured to match the change in his mind. But basically his character remained the same. He was a confused man, without beliefs, unable to make meaningful decisions, drifting in a hostile universe. He was still a man who would run rather than face himself. Aquila was the only idea which remained in his head.

  When Darkscar’s companion again found him and came to take him home, Chaos was a completely beaten man.

  Once again, Chaos failed to reach home, and the man with him was killed. The ship crashed on Ciona, in the sea. Chaos somehow contrived to get to land and eventually ended up in the house of a man named Deepness.

  Yvaine, Deepness’s daughter, slowly brought Chaos back to health and heard his story as he contrived to rearrange his memories once again. Yvaine wanted him to stay on Ciona, but Mark Chaos still only wanted to go home. His mind could contain no other destination except the one which his uncertainty had forced upon him.

  Deepness appealed to Daniel Skywolf of Sula for help, and Skywolf provided Chaos with the ship he needed to take him to Aquila.

  But the landing on Aquila is at best only a temporary solution and probably no solution at all. There is nowhere even on Aquila that Chaos can run to. There is no place in all the stars of the galaxy where he can escape from the shadows in his mind.

  Mark Chaos is a pawn. Like most of the warriors who guided the Beast war to its conclusion, he fell under the influence of the crooked wheel. And like all the others, he is totally unaware of the fact. But he is no longer Hel-janita’s pawn, and he has been more that that for some time. In all likelihood, he never was exclusively Heljanita’s. At least in part, his continual inability to make decisions is attributable to the fact that a good many of his decisions are made for him.

  EVENTUALLY

  The crisis was over, and a calm Mark Chaos walked along the cliff top, watching the white waves rolling off the blue sea to wash the rocks at the base of the cliff face. The sun was bright and warm, but the wind was strong and carried a hint of winter. It gripped him with salt-stained fingers while he walked.

  He went slowly, uncertain about what he was doing, unsure of what he was going to do. But the uncertainty no longer troubled him. It was simply there.

  He did not want to have to walk up to the house and knock on the door. He did not want that kind of embarrassed meeting. He wanted it to be elementary and easy to deal with, an encounter on the cliff top, all alone. His wish, for once, was treated kindly by chance.

  Yvain was on the beach, in a small cove where the cliffs folded in to make a keyhole shape with a bed of silvery sand.

  She saw the lone figure on the cliffs as he came toward the edge of the cove and turned inward to walk around the inlet of the cliff top path. The figure of a lone man walking out here was unusual enough in itself. But this one was special. There was nothing by which she could recognize his silhouette or his walk, but she knew him.

  He had not yet seen her, and she did not trouble to attract his attention. She began running up the path set into the face of the cliff, struggling up the uneven steps and the difficult inclines to be sure of getting to the top at the same time as he did.

  She was out of breath when she got there and couldn’t say anything for a moment or two.

  “Yvaine,” said Chaos, wanting to say at least something more, but feeling the weakness of all the words which sprang instantly to mind.

  “Hello, Mark,” she said, with an awkward simplicity which left him still struggling for words.

  “Why did you come back?” she asked, with a discomfiting directness which took him aback somewhat.

  “To see you.”

  “What about Aquila? What happened?”

  He realized with a sudden shock that it was only a matter of days since he had left Ciona. So much had happened that he had lost all track of actual elapsed time. As far as she was concerned, he should still be resting on Aquila, getting used to his home again. She had no conception of what had happened during the past weeks.

  “Aquila?” he said a little distantly. It was not what he had come to talk about. “It was all a mistake. A compulsion. There was nothing for me there, and it only took a matter
of hours to realize that. Then events caught up with me again. Aquila wasn’t the end of the story, just a way station.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He half smiled. “You never did. I didn’t either for far too long. There was much more in the story than I told you before. Much more than I could know, then. It’s only been a short time. To you, I suppose, the passage of time means very little. There’s no change here except the drifting of the seasons. All those days have meant for you is walking on the beach, reaction and regrets. You’ve still been living in the past. But I was somewhere else, many places. Things were happening to me. There was no time for regrets, hardly time to think.

  “But the story’s over now, I think. You heard most of it, the confusing part. I thought that you’d like to hear the rest.”

  “The story wasn’t important,” she said. “It was you.”

  “The story is me. It’s my story, my life. There’s no difference.”

  She looked away, still not agreeing with him. “Were you at Saraca?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Not in the battle. Not in that battle, anyway. We were fighting somewhere else. I’d like to tell you, if you want to listen. It helps to understand, having someone to listen.”

  Automatically, they were walking back toward the house, as they had done twenty times before, after walking on the cliffs or sitting on the beach. She hadn’t answered, and Chaos frowned.

  “You’re father won’t be pleased to see me,” he said.

  “Iam.”

  “Nothing changed?” he asked. “You don’t sound the same.”

  “A few days older,” she said. It sounded like a good deal more than that. He could see a different girl in her, a completely new person. Reaction and regrets had apparently changed her more than he had anticipated. Perhaps time had not passed so quickly here after all.

  He felt a pang of doubt as he remembered that he had still made no real decisions. He was hoping to find the truth inside his own story. He wondered what would happen if there was nothing there to be found.

  “Do you want to listen?” he persisted, gently.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I ought to know the end of the story.” She placed a slight stress on the word “know.”

  “All right,” he said.

  CHAOS’S STORY

  Daniel Skywolf’s ship set me down in the valley about four or five miles from where I wanted to be. The pilot was no expert, and he didn’t want to risk a landing actually

  17 on the mountain. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t begrudge the walk.

  Evening was creeping on, and the stars were beginning to shine through the eastern sky. I was tired, and my mind was wandering a bit. The tiredness wasn’t only a matter of physical fatigue. It had been ten years since I last walked this road. I was full of strange feelings which I couldn’t identify.

  There had been years of war and wandering; years which were all tangled up with intrigue and conflict. There had been seven terrible years on Calypso’s world; years of despair and decay, of sickness and madness. Through all that, the one thought had carried me—the thought of walking back up this dusty road, into the mountains and home again.

  I had lost my mind once, on Calypso’s world, and found it again here on Ciona. But it wasn’t quite the same mind. It still wasn’t able to push its way back past the Beast war to life on Aquila. There was still a horrible confusion of memory. I knew the road, could feel it in the back of my mind. But I couldn’t remember. It was only there when I saw it again. I couldn’t make mental pictures.

  It was good to be home again, but at the same time I was still afraid. Afraid of men more than anything. While I walked up the road, the whole universe seemed to recede. It was a long time since I’d fought for Eagleheart, helped in the slaughter of the House of Stars. The war seemed very remote now, and so did the Time Gap, and that moment when I’d been forced to look at the stars in hyperspace.

  I don’t know why, but somehow I felt more lonely now than I’d ever been during my years away from Aquila. I shivered a little and coughed, although it wasn’t particularly cold. The aftereffects of the illness hadn’t quite left me, it seems. Unless it was the tension of the particular moment which brought it back. My feet were aching. I pulled my collar a bit tighter, but I didn’t stop to rest.

  My eyes were roaming the slopes around me as I walked, searching for something that was familiar: a particular tree, or a rock, a slope or a bend. But there was nothing except a feel for the road itself. Shadows cowled the mountains and began to advance across the fields as the sun set. It was beautiful but not nostalgically beautiful. There was something wrong, and I knew it or was at least beginning to sense it.

  Darkness fell, and all the stars came out. The air was very dear, and Aquila is far enough from the edge to have a whole sky full of stars. They were a long way off, and they were just lights in the sky. I remember thinking that when I had walked that road before, I must have thought the stars were something wonderful. I must have been in love with the idea of seeing them. But they’d done nothing for me.

  I soon couldn’t see very much on the road in front of me, but my feet continued to find the road with a dogged assurance. It was good, knowing where the road was without seeing it. It almost made me a part of Aquila again. It reassured me that I had not forgotten the way.

  I saw a light in the darkness, but I knew that it wasn’t the light of my own home. I walked toward it, partially out of curiosity. It didn’t take me far from the road. The light was really three lights: two squares of yellow light delineating windows and a third which shone from the open door. There was a neat path laid from the door to a front gate, which cut it off from a rougher path leading to the road. The gate sagged a little because of a weak top hinge.

  The sagging had no doubt been encouraged by people leaning on the gate. There was a man leaning on it now, presumably the owner of the cottage. He was peering into the darkness trying to see me as I approached. He was getting old, and his eyesight wasn’t as good as mine. I could tell that he could hardly see me even when I got quite close.

  “It’s late to be walking,” he commented, in a slow, dry voice. I didn’t recognize the accent, although it was quite marked. I didn’t think it very odd at the time, though.

  “True,” I replied, just to acknowledge the fact that he had spoken. Even my voice sounded strange to me.

  “You’re a stranger,” he said, with a confidence that meant he knew he was right. That took me aback a little, but I remembered that ten years is a long time. “May I offer you shelter?” asked the old man. “Or some food?”

  “It’s a nice night,” I said, coughing to clear my throat. “There’s no real need of shelter. But I’d like some water.”

  The old man opened the gate, and I stepped through. We went up the path, but I paused at the door, a little reluctant to step into the lighted room. He glanced back at me, but there was nothing in his eyes except blankness. I thought he might be blind for an instant, but he wasn’t. He used his eyes too much.

  I got my first clear look at him when he paused. His face was wrinkled, his hair almost all gone, just a few wisps of gray curling across the crown. I didn’t recognize him. I was sure I’d never seen him before, even though he was living within a few miles of where I lived. And there was no sign of recognition the other way. He was still certain that I was a stranger. Perhaps I was to him, I thought. I wished that I hadn’t forgotten so much on Calypso’s world.

  I’d changed too, of course. My face was different. And my voice too, I suppose.

  When he handed me a cup of water, I thought about telling him who I was. But I didn’t. I don’t know why. It was more tiredness than anything else. I wanted to be on my way.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, accepting the cup which I handed back to him.

  “I must go,” I said, retreating slowly up the path, still facing the door. I was waving my hand in no particul
ar direction. There was no need for me to be uncomfortable but nevertheless I was. He didn’t say anything more.

  The door closed, cutting down the light, and I bumped into the gate as I left. I limped for a couple of steps and swore, but by the time I got back to the road, I’d regained my stride and my confidence. Once again, I set off into the darkness, not thinking very much about anything.

  THE GALAXY

  The galaxy is not alive. Nevertheless, it has many of the characteristics normally associated with life. In some ways, it is like Heljanita’s toys: intelligent, sentient, but mechanical.

  But it is an entity on a far vaster scale than the toys, and not simply in terms of spatial dimensions. It exists by totally different standards. In human terms, it is only a body of stars—an accumulation of matter in a small area of space. In order to even describe the true nature of the galaxy, it is necessary to adopt a whole new way of thought.

  The galaxy’s existence spans both space and hyperspace. It has certain aspects typical of both, and its components possess the aspects of their own particular set of circumstances. It has a beginning and an end, and its time span is characterized by certain changes. The beginning was creation: the formation of an organized entity from a cloud of unformed atomic gas. The end cannot be known.

  The progress of the galaxy from beginning to end, the metamorphoses and the maturations, take place on an entirely different scale than do the lives of men. It is not simply a matter of centuries being as seconds, but a whole new concept of temporal organization. The galaxy exists in cosmic time, men in pulse-and-rotation time. There is as much and as little relation between them as there is between the bodily organization and function of a man and the organization and function of the components of the atoms which make up his body. The two are the same. They are both aspects of time and thus share an identity. But just as the spin of individual electron clouds and the orientation of neutrons within a nucleus are of little consequence to the shape and movement of the body which the atoms compose, so the detailed activities of pulse-and-rotation time have no direct bearing on the surge of cosmic time. The orders of magnitude of the two levels are very different.