Valeddom
5: onuk

Jacko ceremoniously shook my hand, his face lit up with a grin which told me without words how great was this meeting of classmates upon a rock-billow in the wilderness of Valeddom. However, he looked askance at the other Nydrs; inevitably he wondered how they might react to his identity.
    They simply stared. Just quietly, passively astonished at the revelation of yet another Earth-mind in their midst, they were too amazed to speak.
Well, they ought to be happy, thought I. For now they no longer had any reason to be suspicious of Tmaeu as a Vutuan. Go on, please, I urged them silently; you accepted me; accept Jacko as well. Else lack of co-operation will get us all killed.
    Protest came, however, not from the Nydrs but from Mr Bryce.
    “What the devil did you mean,” he exploded, “by holding out on us all this time? You must have been here ever since the bus crash. Every bit as long as we. Why hide from us?”
    His anger was infectious so that I began to wonder, was I being gullible, bamboozled by the eerie quiet of this lonely northern wilderness into accepting anything that looked like a friend? If so, how ironic! – for back on Earth I had never been friends with Jackson, we were such different types. In those days he had been the tall, strong, confident one; he never did worry about anything, because wherever he was, he coped.
    Except, as I reminded myself, that he’d failed his exams, and so he had had to repeat the year.... That’s the clue (tapped the drum-beats of hudar). The fellow’s lazy by nature.... and then he has to make up for it…
    Jacko/Tmaeu now spoke with the object of defusing Bryce’s anger.
    “I know it looks bad, Sir, but let me explain: it didn’t happen to me the same way it did to you. The crash threw me here, yeah, into a Mercurian body; but Tmaeu wasn’t a Dluku, remember; Tmaeu was – is – a normal Valeddomian with a mind in full working order. He did let me in (I’m just another aspect of himself, after all), but he kept control.”
    I put in a question: “Was that horrible? I mean, for the Jacko ego to be trapped in the Tmaeu skull….”
    “Hard to explain, but no, it wasn’t horrible, exactly…. To be frank, it suited me. I didn’t want control; I was happy to let him do the worrying.”
    “So,” growled Bryce, “you’re saying, you didn’t make yourself known to us, on account of you didn’t have a say – you were just riding passively inside his head. Hmm.... and you preferred it that way.”
    “Yep. No use denying it.”
    “Well.... all right.... can’t say I blame you.... I could have done with a period of apprenticeship, myself.”
    The next question was obvious. Bryce, however, hesitated to ask it.
Haffnem stepped forward. Her parents stayed back, recognizing that she had the special right to sort this out alone. She came to Jackson and took his arm lovingly, and put the simple question:
    “What has happened to Tmaeu now?”
    “Tmaeu, in a way,” said Jacko with a new gentleness, “has given up.”
    Haffnem paled.
    Jacko continued: “He will always be in here,” he tapped his head, “but he is now the one who’s just along for the ride. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
    All of us held our breath. Haffnem’s previous sufferings could not compare with this. Admittedly I, her brother, had also become an Earth-mind, but I had previously been lost to her anyway, when I’d become a Dluku. And so when she had found me awoken from the Dluku state, she had been overjoyed, for the fact that I had awoken with a somewhat different personality and different set of memories was a small thing to put up with compared to the boon of finding that I had awoken at all. But this more recent catastrophe, compressed into one sudden shock, hit her harder.
    Jackson soothed, “Remember, your Tmaeu is not gone. Same soul! But...”
    “Yes, but,” she echoed with a desolate sob.
    “But,” he continued, “what with the weakening of Vutu.... I’ve, uh, bobbed up into the driving-seat.”
    “I understand,” she said, burying her head in his embrace.
    Fred Jackson looked around grimly at our staring faces. “And now it’s my responsibility – since my other self has passed all his knowledge onto me – to tell you that the sooner we put distance between ourselves and Vutu, the better. We should get moving, and fast. Time spent in discussion is time wasted.”
    Fnekt asked, “Can you tell us why we should take your word for that?”
    “I sure can. Think of it this way: I, Fred Jackson, unbiased Earth-mind, am telling you that the Vutuans aren’t kidding when they say keep away from Nought. You hoped that was just a ritual phrase? Well, it is an empty ritual – but it’s empty in a sense that should make us worry all the more. It’s a vain hope. Nowadays no one succeeds forever in keeping away from Nought. And when it finally gets you, when your chest-band runs down to zero, uh, that’s when you, uh, sing from the same sheet. Get me?”
    We all swapped uncomfortable glances, and Bryce alone spoke:
    “A group mind?”
    “A group mind,” sighed Jackson/Tmaeu. “Ren has already told you that the Vutuans as individuals are more or less dead anyway. It is not they, it is the city that lives.”
    “But.... I keep thinking of Hyth Siedr.... She seemed like an individual to me.”
    Jacko shrugged, “I guess it’s, uh, a kind of mind-tax. You’re allowed to keep something, but a hell of a lot goes to the government. I don’t think any of us could stand that.” He paused, and none of us contradicted him. He continued, “I (as Tmaeu) ran away from it once. I’m not going back again. Nor should you.”
    Bryce clapped him on the shoulder, while Fnekt, smoothing away his sour look, assured him that he withdrew his objections. Any risk was preferable to going back to Vutu.
    “Then we continue northwards?” Bryce asked.
    “For now, yes,” Jacko said. “It’s the only direction in which the Vutuans dare not follow.”
    I spoke up. “Can you tell us why they dread the North?”
    “No, not really. I can recite some meaningless names....”
    Meaningless names were better than nothing. “Tell us, then.”
    “Onuk, realm of the zitpoidl.”
    “Is that it?” asked Bryce.
    “Yep, that’s just about it. Two new words for you to learn.”
    “But what, pray,” Bryce persisted, “is a ‘zitpoidl’?”
    “You mean, ‘What is a zitpoid.’ ‘Zitpoidl’ with the ‘l’ sound on the end is the plural. Means ‘The stones-that-walk.’ I told you it didn’t make sense.”
    Indeed, neither to me, nor to my fellow-Ixlians, nor to Bryce’s Jempeldexan memory-store, did the word mean anything at all; apparently, even to the Vutuans it was just one of those terms – common on a very old planet – that were worn down by thoughtless repetition to a mere nub of sound, bearing echoes of ancient emotion.
    Jackson added, “Anyhow, I’m not that keen to find out.”
    We all agreed that we could well do without an encounter with the stones-that-walk. Fnekt summed up our aims. “We take advantage of the prevailing fear, to go north to escape the Vutuans; but not so far as to meet these unpromising ‘zitpoidl’. When we reach this compromise distance, we circle round, find a route south and head for Ixli. The water-bottles and the berries in our bags will last us, we hope.”
    Our chances of survival didn’t seem brilliant, but we couldn’t think of a better plan.

                                                  *****

We trekked. Gradually the terrain altered. The blue-black rock under our boots remained hard as ever but looked more doughy and bubbly, or whipped up into corkscrew spikes which leaned crazily in the aftermath of their primeval convulsion. Vegetation became non-existent. You couldn’t imagine any terrain less suited to human life.
    Nevertheless at times we wondered whether some kind of trail was visible in this chaotic land. A trail leading north, marked out by pointers? Or a chance arrangement of rocks? Then atop one broad summit the arguments ceased.
    A man-size figure stood ahead of us.
    He had his back to us and his left arm out, with the palm towards us, like a traffic cop bidding us halt.
    He stood very still, on a square slab which we came to understand was a plinth, when we realized that the man was carved from stone.
    We advanced and came round to the front of the statue. Jacko said, “The Defender.”
    The right hand held a carven energy gun pointed ahead; the face.... I had never seen such a noble face.... or rather I had, just once – during a holiday in Italy.
    “Tell us more!” demanded Bryce. “Who was he?”
    “We don’t know if he was a real person,” Jacko replied. “Maybe just an idealized Vutuan of long ago.”
    Not much like the Vutuans of nowadays, I thought. Nor, indeed, did the stone hero remind me of anyone on Earth, except –
    My memory flashed back a couple of years, to when I’d been taken me round some galleries and museums in Rome and Florence. I didn’t have much art appreciation at that age, but one statue, of a tall man with sword and shield, did really bowl me over. When you see him you know, if you didn’t know already, that a real hero is a quiet hero; just looking at him makes you want to be as fine, as modest, as unselfishly brave as he: one who can look deadly danger in the eye without a trace of macho posturing, with nothing but pure determination to fight evil and to protect the defenceless. And I remember he inspired me with the feeling that even I, if I were by his side, would dare to stand with equally level eye to face the approaching dragon. Yes, Donatello’s “Saint George” is everything a man should be; and now, here on Mercury, I was looking at someone who might have shared the same soul.
    Whether the statue represented some real historical Vutuan, or whether it was just an idealization into which the ancient sculptor had poured all his notions of gentle valour, purity and honour, it showed what must have been the best side of the civilization that produced it.
    But this Defender also had a message for us. His left arm clearly signalled, “Stop!”
    If we took him seriously, we should not go any further along this road.
    It was time, therefore, to decide that we had gone far enough north, and to implement that part of our plan that involved circling round to the east.
    We didn’t want to trespass on the domain of the zitpoidl.
    Turn east! my mind urged. An immediate change of direction is called for!
    But we resumed walking northwards.
    At first, I suppose, each of us thought what I thought: “Might as well go on a bit further without making an issue out of it, since the others have judged it wise not to veer to the right just yet.”
    Next, the suspicion took hold, that this “just a little further” was going on rather peculiarly long.
    Several minutes more went by before I admitted – and I presume the others also knew – that we were no longer our own masters; that we had come within range of a power that could compel us to obey its summons.

                                                 *****

At this point I must remind myself, the writer and you, the reader, of the purpose for which I am telling this tale: namely, to help others who may find themselves translated from world to world. It’s only fair if I pause here to issue a warning.
    Vutu had been strange enough, but at least its inhabitants were human. Though (as I had finally realized) they weren’t conscious in the normal sense, and though I called the place a “nuthouse”, I nevertheless could recognize that in principle, given the time, I might be able to shine the light of reason upon the happenings there.
    But – sorry about this – the murk definitely thickens from now on. Onuk, unlike Vutu, was not a human realm. It gave me even less opportunity than Vutu did, to use reason or logic while struggling through its thicket of events. And beyond Onuk, in the ultimate climax of my stay on Mercury (which occurred in a city that was human) I have to admit that in the end what got me through was pure hudar, and that must seem like cheating. Again, sorry!
    So henceforth, though you can expect me to narrate what happened to me and what I did about it, and how I felt and thought about it at the time and later, yet for all my efforts, the world of Valeddom remains an impenetrable riddle, a jungle of mystery in which I never found a big enough clearing or vantage point from which to grasp the general scheme.
    However, my rough and ready decisions, hunches, instincts, and ideas snatched in desperation, formed the machete with which I hacked my way through. Or to put it another way, I did, sometimes, make local sense of things – which is why I survived.

                                                 *****

TO BE CONTINUED