The Gods Themselves (9 page)

He had been carefully devoted to her, as Parentals always were; to their little-mids more than to the other two, as always. It had annoyed her and she would dream of the day when he would leave her. Parentals always did eventually; and how she had missed him, when one day, he finally did.

He had come to tell her, just as carefully as he could, despite the difficulty Parentals had in putting their feelings into words. She had run from him that day; not in malice; not because she suspected what he had to tell her; but only out of joy. She had managed to find a special place at midday and had gorged herself in unexpected isolation and had been filled with a queer, itching sensation that demanded motion and activity. She had slithered over the rocks and had let her edges overlap theirs. It was something she knew to be a grossly improper action for anyone but a baby and yet it was something at once exciting and soothing.

And her Parental caught her at last and had stood before her, silent for a long time, making his eyes small and dense as though to stop every bit of light reflected from her; to see as much as he could of her; and for as long as possible.

At first, she just stared back with the confused thought that he had seen her rub through the rocks and was ashamed of her. But she caught no shame-aura and finally she said, very subdued, "What is it, Daddy?"

"Why, Dua, it's the time. I've been expecting it. Surely you have."

"What time?" Now that it was here, Dua stubbornly would not let herself know. If she refused to know, there would be nothing to know. (She never quite got out of that habit. Odeen said all Emotionals were like that, in the lofty voice he used sometimes when he was particularly overcome with the importance of being a Rational.)

Her Parental had said, "I must pass on. I will not be with you any more." Then he just stood and looked at her, and she couldn't say anything.

He said, "You will tell the others."

"Why?" Dua turned away rebelliously, her outlines vague and growing vaguer, trying to dissipate. She
wanted
to dissipate altogether and of course she couldn't. After a while, it hurt and cramped and she hardened again. Her Parental didn't even bother to scold her and tell her that it would be shameful if anyone saw her stretched out so.

She said,
” They
won't care," and immediately felt sorrowful that her Parental would be hurt at that.
He
still called them "little-left" and "little-right," but little-left was all involved with his studies and little-right kept talking about forming a triad. Dua was the only one of the three who still felt— Well, she was the youngest. Emotionals always were and with them it was different.

Her Parental only said, "You will tell them anyway." And they stood looking at each other.

She didn't want to tell them. They weren't close any more. It-had been different when they were all little. They could hardly tell themselves apart in those days; left-brother from right-brother from mid-sister. They were all wispy and would tangle with each other and roll through each other and hide in the walls.

No one ever minded that when they were little; none of the grown-ups. But then the brothers grew thick and sober and drew away. And when she complained to her Parental, he would only say gently, "You are too old to thin, Dua."

She tried not to listen, but left-brother kept drawing away and would say, "Don't snuggle; I have no time for you." And right-brother began to stay quite hard all the time and became glum and silent. She didn't understand it quite then and Daddy had not been able to make it clear. He would say every once in a while as though it were a lesson he had once learned—"Lefts are Rationals, Dua. Rights are Parentals. They grow up their own way."

She didn't like their way. They were no longer children and she still was, so she flocked with the other Emotionals. They all had the same complaints about their brothers. They all talked of coming triads. They all spread in the Sun and fed. They all grew more and more the same and every day the same things were said.

And she grew to detest them and went off by herself whenever she could, so that they left and called her "Left-Em." (It had been a long time now since she had heard that call, but she never thought of that phrase without remembering perfectly the thin ragged voices that kept it up after her with a kind of half-wit persistence because they knew it hurt.)

But her Parental retained his interest in her even when it must have seemed to him that everyone else laughed at her. He tried, in his clumsy way, to shield her from the others. He followed her to the surface sometimes, even, though he hated it himself, in order to make sure she was safe.

She came upon him once, talking to a Hard One. It was hard for a Parental to talk to a Hard One; even though she was quite young, she knew that much. Hard Ones talked only to Rationals.

She was quite frightened and she wisped away but not before she had heard her Parental say, "I take good care of her, Hard-sir."

Could the Hard One have inquired about her? About her queerness, perhaps. But her Parental had not been apologetic. Even to the Hard One, he had spoken of his concern for her. Dua felt an obscure pride.

But now he was leaving and suddenly all the independence that Dua had been looking forward to lost its fine shape and hardened into the pointed crag of loneliness. She said, "But
why
must you pass on?"

"M
ust,
little mid-dear."

He must. She knew that. Everyone, sooner or later, must. The day would come when she would have to sigh and say, "I must."

"But what makes you know when you have to pass one? If you can choose your time, why don't you choose a different time and stay longer?"

He said, "Your left-father has decided. The triad must do as he says."

"Why must you do what he says?" She hardly ever saw her left-father or her mid-mother. They didn't count any more. Only her right-father, her Parental, her daddy, who stood there squat and flat-surfaced. He wasn't all smooth-curved like a Rational or shuddery uneven like an Emotional, and she could always tell what he was going to say. Almost always.

She was sure he would say, "I can't explain to a little Emotional."

He said it.

Dua said in a burst of woe, "I'll miss you. I know you think I pay you no attention, and that I don't like you for always telling me not to do things. But I would rather not like you for telling me not to do things, than not have you around to tell me not to do things."

And Daddy just stood there. There was no way he could handle an outburst like that except to come closer and pinch out a hand. It cost him a visible effort, but he held it out trembling and its outlines were ever so slightly soft.

Dua said, "Oh, Daddy," and let her own hand flow about it so that his looked misty and shimmery through her substance; but she was careful not to touch it for that would have embarrassed him so.

Then he withdrew it and left her hand enclosing nothing and he said, "Remember the Hard Ones, Dua. They will help you. I—I will go now."

He went and she never saw him again.

Now she sat there, remembering in the sunset, and rebelliously aware that pretty soon Tritt would grow petulant over her absence and nag Odeen.

And then Odeen might lecture her on her duties.

She didn't care.

1b

Odeen was moderately aware that Dua was off on the surface. Without really thinking about it, he could judge her direction and even something of her distance. If he had stopped to think of it, he might have felt displeasure, for this inter-awareness sense had been steadily deadening for a long time now and, without really being certain why, he had a sense of gathering fulfillment about it. It was the way things were supposed to be; the sign of the continuing development of the body with age.

Tritt's inter-awareness sense did not decrease, but it shifted more and more toward the children. That was clearly the line of useful development, but then the role of the Parental was a simple one, in a manner of speaking, however important. The Rational was far more complex and Odeen took a bleak satisfaction in that thought.

Of course, it was Dua who was the real puzzle. She was so unlike all the other Emotionals. That puzzled and frustrated Tritt and reduced him to even more pronounced inarticulacy. It puzzled and frustrated Odeen at times, too, but he was also aware of Dua's infinite capacity to induce satisfaction with life and it did not seem likely that one was independent of the other. The occasional exasperation she produced was a small price to pay for the intense happiness.

And maybe Dua's odd way of life was part of what ought to be, too. The Hard Ones seemed interested in her and ordinarily they paid attention only to Rationals. He felt pride in that; so much the better for the triad that even the Emotional was worth attention.

Things were as they were supposed to be. That was bedrock, and it was what he wanted most to feel, right down to the end. Someday he would even know when it was time to pass on and then he would want to. The Hard Ones assured him of that, as they assured all Rationals, but they also told him that it was his own inner consciousness that would mark the time unmistakably, and not any advice from outside.

"When
you
tell yourself," Losten had told him—in the clear, careful way in which a Hard One always talked to a Soft One, as though the Hard One were laboring to make himself understood, "that you know why you must pass on, then you will pass on, and your triad will pass on with you."

And Odeen had said, "I cannot say I wish to pass on now, Hard-sir. There is so much to learn."

"Of course, left-dear. You feel this because you are not yet ready."

Odeen thought: How could I ever feel ready when I would never feel there wasn't much to learn?

But he didn't say so. He was quite certain the time would come and he would then understand.

He looked down at himself,  almost forgetting and thrusting out an eye to do so—there were always some childish impulses in even the most adult of the most Rational. He didn't have to, of course. He would sense quite well with his eye solidly in place, and he found himself satisfactorily solid; nice, sharp outline, smooth and Curved into gracefully conjoined ovoids.

His body lacked the strangely attractive shimmer of Dua, and the comforting stockiness of Tritt. He loved them both, but he would not change his own body for either. And, of course, his own mind. He would never say so, of course, for he would not want to hurt their feelings, but he never ceased being thankful that he did not have Tritt's limited understanding or (even more) Dua's erratic one. He supposed they didn't mind for they knew nothing else.

He grew distantly aware of Dua again, and deliberately dulled the sense. At the moment, he felt no need for her. It was not that he wanted her less, but merely that he had increasing drives elsewhere. It was part of the growing maturity of a Rational to find more and more satisfaction in the exercise of a mind that could only be practiced alone, and with the Hard Ones.

He grew constantly more accustomed to the Hard Ones; constantly more attached to them. He felt that was right and proper, too, for he was a Rational and in a way the Hard Ones were super-Rationals. (He had once said that to Losten, the friendliest of the Hard Ones and, it seemed to Odeen in some vague way the youngest. Losten had radiated amusement but had said nothing. And that meant he had not denied it, however.)

Odeen's earliest memories were filled with Hard Ones. His Parental more and more concentrated his attention on the last child, the baby-Emotional. That was only natural. Tritt would do it, too, when the last child came, if it ever did. (Odeen had picked up that last qualification from Tritt, who used it constantly as a reproach to Dua.)

But so much the better. With his Parental busy so much of the time, Odeen could begin his education that much the earlier. He was losing his baby ways and he had learned a great deal even before he met Tritt.

That meeting, though, was surely something he would never forget. It might as well have been yesterday as more than half a lifetime ago. He had seen Parentals of his own generation, of course; young ones who, long before they incubated the children that made true Parentals of them, showed few signs of the stolidity to come. As a child he had played with his own right-brother and was scarcely aware of any intellectual difference between them (though, looking back on those days, he recognized that it was there, even then).

He knew also, vaguely, the role of a Parental in a triad. Even as a child, he had whispered tales of melting.

When Tritt first appeared, when Odeen saw him first, everything changed. For the first time in his life, Odeen felt an inner warmth and began to think that there was something he wanted that was utterly divorced from thought. Even now, he could remember the sense of embarrassment that had accompanied this.

Tritt was not embarrassed, of course. Parentals were never embarrassed about the activities of the triad, and Emotionals were almost never embarrassed. Only Rationals had that problem.

"Too much thinking," a Hard One had said when Odeen had discussed the problem with him and that left Odeen dissatisfied. In what way could thinking be "too much"?

Tritt was young when they first met, of course. He was still so childish as to be uncertain in his blockishness so that his reaction to the meeting was embarrassingly clear. He grew almost translucent along his edges.

Odeen said, hesitantly, "I haven't seen you before, have I, right-fellow?"

Tritt said, "I have never been here. I have been brought here."

They both knew exactly what had happened to them. The meeting had been arranged because someone (some Parental, Odeen had thought at the time, but later he knew it was some Hard One) thought they would suit each other, and the thought was correct.

There was no intellectual rapport between the two, of course. How could there be when Odeen wanted to learn with an intensity that superseded anything but the existence of the triad itself, and Tritt lacked the very concept of learning? What Tritt had to know, he knew beyond either learning or unlearning.