Sleepwalkers' World by Gordon R. Dickson

Author:Gordon R. Dickson [Dickson, Gordon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Sci-Fi
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 1985-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

10

“Lucas?” called Rafe. “Lucas?” Reaching out with his under-mind, he found the wolf, and the mind of Lucas led him to the Canadian north woods, where Lucas waited by a pine-fringed lake so lonely and untouched in appearance it looked as if it had hidden itself successfully even from Black-foot, Cree, and nineteenth-century fur-trappers. The five-place aircraft reached the lake and sank down into a little clearing on the hard earth by the shore, under the light of stars only—for the sun was down back here and the moon not yet risen. Rafe sagged wearily in his seat at the controls.

“Come on,” said Gaby, helping him to his feet. “You can’t sleep outside. Martin and I set up a bed for you in the back of the plane.”

“Not necessary,” said Rafe, but the words came out in a sigh of exhaustion, and he did not object further as Gaby helped him to the rear of the plane. “This isn’t going to be anything. I don’t even feel too bad now—just tired: And I think I can heal myself in a hur-ry ....”

He let himself be pushed into the makeshift bed in the back of the aircraft and covered with blankets that smelled faintly of the mothproofing of an airplane emergency stores’ locker.

“All right,” he said. “But I’ll be up and around tomorrow morning before the rest of you are.”

Only he was not.

He woke later to fever and pain and drifted off into hallucination. Once more, endlessly, he walked the caverns where the hollow and useless things lived and the papery monster ruled. Now and then he was other places as well—places out of his own personal memory of the real world. But both there and in the caves, everywhere his fever dreams took him, there were pain and struggle. He fought or fled endlessly, emerging from his hallucinations to rest a little while in reality, then returning to fight with shadows and flee again.

When he finally came back to the real world to stay, he felt like a hollow man. He was aware of his own mortality, like a ticking clock inside him which must run down someday, and the feebleness of his own muscles was like a special curse laid upon him.

Fury moved in him against his new helplessness. But then that emotion passed and he was conscious of a new feeling, one he had never felt before. It was almost as if he were glad to be weak, glad to put off the feeling of physical superiority with which he had been born and which had always directed the course of his life. Maybe I could be human like everybody else after all, he found himself thinking, if I stayed like this.

The thought pierced some ancient barrier in his mind. For the first time he could remember, he was conscious of how lonely he was, how lonely he had always been—isolated by his physical superiority and that powerful empathic talent that every so often wrenched him out of himself and plunged him without choice into the minds and emotions of others.

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