The Man Who Lost the Sea (12 page)

“Can’t recall.”

“I can. You mailed it back to the woman you stole it from. Why, Deeming?”

“Why, why, why! I always did that, that’s why!”

“Not always. Only when it was a watch which was all the woman had left of her dead husband, or when it was something of equal value. You know what you are, Deeming? You’re a softy.”

“You’re having yourself a time.”

“I’m sorry,” said the giant gently. “Deeming, I didn’t win, as you just put it. You’ve won.”

“Look,” said Deeming, “you’ve caught up with me and I’ll get mine. Let’s let it go at that and skip the preaching, all right? Right. Let’s go. I’m tired.”

The Angel put out both hands, fingers slightly spread. Deeming tingled. He distinctly heard two sharp cracks as his spine stretched and reseated itself. He looked up sharply.

“Tired now?” smiled the Angel.

Deeming touched his own forearms, his eyelids. “No,” he breathed, “By God, no, I’m not.” He cocked his head and said reluctantly, “That’s the first one of your tricks I’ve liked, shorty.” He looked again at the jovial golden man. “Just what are you guys, anyway? Oh, all right,” he said immediately, “I know, I know. That’s
the question you never answer. Skip it.”

“
You
can ask it.” Disregarding Deeming’s slack-jawed astonishment at that, the Angel said, “Once we were a strong-arm squad. Sort of a small private army, if you can understand that. All through history there’ve been mercenaries. Once there was a thug called the Pinkerton man. You wouldn’t know about that—it was before your time. Our outfit was operated originally by a man called Angell—with two Ls, and we were called Angell’s, with an apostrophe S. So the name really came before the fancy clothes and the Sunday-school kind of activity we go in for now.”

“And as time went on we recruited more carefully and improved our rank and file more, and in the meantime our management became less and less, until finally we didn’t have a management. Just us, and an idea that we could stop a lot of trouble if we could make people be kind to one another.”

“You’ve sometimes got an offbeat way of being kind!”

“People used to shoot a horse with a broken leg. It was kind,” said the Angel.

“So why do you tell me all this?”

“I’m recruiting.”

“What?

“Recruiting,” the Angel said clearly. “Mustering new men. Making new Angels. Like you, if you want to.”

“Aw, now wait a mucking minute here,” said Deeming. “You’re not going to stand there and tell me you can turn me into an Angel! Not me, you’re not.”

“Why not?”

“Not me,” said Deeming doggedly. “I’m not the Angel type.”

“You’re not? What type is a man so big he can’t live one life at a time but has to play the inverted
and
upside-down Robin Hood for the people? Were you aware that you never stole from anyone who did not, in the long run, benefit by it, learn something from it, and, if he’d lost something of real importance, he always got it back?”

“Is that really so?”

“I can show you a case history of every single one of them.”

“You’ve been on to me for that long?”

“Since you were in third grade.”

“Cut it out,” said Deeming. “You’d have to be invisible.”

The Angel disappeared. Blinking, Deeming walked slowly over to the hull and ran his hand over it.

“Not that that’s so marvelous, once you know how it’s done. Do you know any reason why a flicker-field shouldn’t be refined down to something the size of your fist?” demanded the Angel’s voice from mid-air. Deeming whirled and saw nothing. He backed against the boat, wide-eyed. “Over here,” said the Angel cheerfully, and reappeared to the right. He drew back his cloak and turned down his waist-band. Deeming briefly glimpsed a small, curved, flat plastic pack of some kind.

“You’ve got to understand,” said the Angel, “that human beings, by and large, are by nature both superstitious and reverent. If you substitute science for their theology, they’ll just get reverent about their science. All we do is give them what they want anyway. We never pretend to be anything special, but neither do we deny anything they think about us. If they think we’re power-hungry slave traders, we prove they’re wrong. If they think we’re demigods or something, we don’t say anything at all.

“It works out. There hasn’t been a war in so long that half the population couldn’t define the word. And we came along when we were needed most, believe me. When man was expanding against and through extra-terrestrial cultures. The word had to be spread, or damn well else.”

“Just exactly what is the word? What are you really after?”

“I’ve already told you, but it sounds so confounded simple that nobody will believe it until they see it in action, and then they find something else to describe it. I’ll try you again,” said the Angel, chuckling. “The word is,
be kind to each other
. It opened the sky.”

“I have to think about that,” said Deeming, overwhelmed. He shook it off. “Later, I’ll think about it … I hear things about you people. I hear you don’t eat.”

“That’s so.”

“Or sleep.”

“True. We don’t breed either; we haven’t been able to get our
treatment to take on women, though we’ll make it someday. We’re not a species or a race, or supermen, or anything like that. We’re descendants, out of sadism by technology, of the yinyang weed.”

“Yinyang!”

“Our dark and deadly secret,” said the Angel, laughing. ‘You know what the stuff does to people who take it uncontrolled. In the right hands, it’s no more addictive than any other medicine. And you see, Deeming, you don’t, you just
don’t
increase intelligence by a factor of five and fail to see that people must be kind to one another. So the word, as I’ve called it, isn’t a doctrine as such, or a philosophy, but simply a logical dictate. By the way, if you decide against joining us, don’t go clacking in public about yinyang, or you’ll get yourself clobbered out of thin air.”

“What did you say? What?” shouted Deeming. “If I decide against … Have I a choice?”

“Can you honestly conceive of our forcing you to get people to be kind to each other?” asked the Angel soberly.

Deeming walked away and walked back again, eyes closed, pounding a fist into his other hand. “Well, you don’t force me; fine. But I still have no choice. I’ll take your word for it—though it’ll be months before it really sinks in—that you boys are off my back. But I can’t go back to that mess on Earth, with all old Rockhard’s affairs churning around and the government poking into all his associations, and …”

“What mess did you say?” asked the Angel, and laughed. “Deeming, there isn’t any mess.”

“But Rockhard …”

“There isn’t any Rockhard. Did you ever hear of any Rockhard before that fat boy called on you that night?”

“Well, no, but that doesn’t mean- Oh, by golly, it
does
mean … yeah, but what about the big smash-up, all Rockhard’s affairs; it was in all the newscasts, it said right there …”

“In how many newscasts?”

“When I was on Iolanthe! I saw it myself when—oh. Oh. A private showing.”

“You were in no position to be suspicious,” the Angel excused him kindly.

“I’ll say I wasn’t. Your flyboys were about to knock me out of the sky. I could’ve been killed.”

“Right.”

“Matter of fact, suppose I’d kept my mouth shut when I was welded up in the landing foot of that ship? I might be there yet!”

“Correct.”

“And if I’d bobbled that job on Ybo I could have caught a disrupter beam.”

“Just get used to it and you won’t be so indignant. Certainly you were in danger. Everything was set up so that you had right and wrong choices to make, and a great deal of freedom in between. You made the right choices and you’re here. We can use you. We couldn’t use a man who might jump the wrong way in an emergency.”

“They say you’re immortal,” said Deeming abruptly.

“Nonsense!” said the Angel. “That’s just a rumor, probably based on the fact that none of us has died yet. I don’t doubt that we will.”

“Oh,” said Deeming, and started to think of something else. Then the full impact of what he had just heard reached him. He whispered, “But there have been gold-cloaked Angels around for two thousand years!”

“Twenty-three hundred,” said the Angel.

“For that you stop breeding,” said Deeming, and added rudely, “tell me, Gramps, is it worth it?”

“In all kindness,” beamed the Angel, “I do believe you should have three of your teeth knocked down your throat, to guard you against making such remarks in the presence of someone who might take it less kindly than I do.”

“I withdraw the remark,” said Deeming, bowing low; and when he straightened up his face was puckered up like that of a child wanting to cry but hanging on tight. “I have to make gags about it, sir. Can’t you see that? Or I—I …”

“All right, boy. Don’t let it worry you … it’s a big thing to meet without warning. D’ye think I’ve forgotten that?”

They stood for a while in companionable silence. Then, “How long do I have to make up my mind?”

“As much time as it takes. You’ve qualified, you understand that?
Your invitation is permanent. You can only lose it by breaking faith with me.”

“I can’t see myself starting a movement to persuade people to hate each other. Not after this. And I’m not likely to talk. Who’d listen?”

“An Angel,” said the golden one softly, “no matter whom you were talking to. Now—what do you want to do?”

“I want to go back to Earth.”

The Angel waved at the boat. “Help yourself.”

Deeming looked at him and bit his lip. “Don’t you want to know why?”

The Angel silently smiled.

“It’s just that I have to,” blurted Deeming protestingly. “I mean, all my damn miserable years I’ve been afraid to live more than half a life at a time. Even when I created a new one, for kicks, I shut off the original while it was going on. I want to go back the way I am, and learn how to be as big as I am.” He leaned forward and tapped the Angel’s broad chest. “That—is—pretty damn big. If I let you make me into what you are, I’d go back larger than life size. I want to be life size for a time. I think that’s what I mean. You don’t have to be an Angel to be big. You don’t have to be any more than a man to live by the word, for that matter.” He fell silent.

“How do you know what it’s like to be what you call ‘life size’?”

“I did it for about three minutes, standing on the steps of the Astro Central on Ybo. I was talking to …”

“You could go back by way of Ybo.”

“She wouldn’t look my way, except to have me arrested,” said Deeming. “She saw me shoot an Angel.”

“Then we’ll have that same Angel arrest you, and restore her faith in us.”

Deeming never reached Earth. He was arrested on Ybo and the arresting Angel draped him over a thick forearm and displayed him to the girl Tandy. She watched him stride off with his prisoner and ran after them.

“What are you going to do with him?”

“What would you do?”

They looked at each other for a time, until the Angel said to Deeming, “Can you tell me honestly that you have something to learn from this girl, and that you’re willing to learn it?”

“Oh yes,” said Deeming.

“Teach him what?” cried the girl, in a panic. “Teach him how?”

“By being yourself,” Deeming said, and when he said that the Angel let go of him.

“Come see me,” the Angel said to Deeming, “three days after this is over.”

It was over when she died and after they had lived together on Ybo for seventy-four years, and in three days he was able to sit among his great-grandchildren and decide what to do next.

He left his clothes in the car and slipped down to the beach.

Moonrise, she’d said.

He glanced at the eastern horizon and was informed of nothing. It was a night to drink the very airglow, and the stars lay lightless like scattered talc on the background.

“Moonrise,” he muttered.

Easy enough for her. Moonrise was something, in her cosmos, that one simply knew about. He’d had to look it up. You don’t realize—certainly
she’d
never realize—how hard it is, when you don’t know anything about it, to find out exactly what time moonrise is supposed to be, at the dark of the moon. He still wasn’t positive, so he’d come early, and would wait.

He shuffled down to the whispering water, finding it with ears and toes. “Woo.” Catch m’ death, he thought. But it never occurred to him to keep
her
waiting. It wasn’t in her to understand human frailties.

He glanced once again at the sky, then waded in and gave himself to the sea. It was chilly, but by the time he had taken ten of the fine strong strokes which had first attracted her, he felt wonderful. He thought, oh well, by the time I’ve learned to breathe under water, it should be no trick at all to find moonrise without an almanac.

He struck out silently for the blackened and broken teeth of rock they call Harpy’s Jaw, with their gums of foam and the floss of tide-risen weed bitten up and hung for the birds to pick. It was oily calm everywhere but by the Jaw, which mumbled and munched on every wave and spit the pieces into the air. He was therefore very close before he heard the singing. What with the surf and his concentration on flanking the Jaw without cracking a kneecap the way he had that first time, he was in deep water on the seaward side
before he noticed the new quality in the singing: Delighted, he trod water and listened to be sure; and sure enough, he was right.

It sounded terrible.

“Get your flukes out of your mouth,” he bellowed joyfully, “you baggy old guano-guzzler.”

“You don’t sound so hot yourself, chum,” came the shrill falsetto answer, “and you know what type fish-gut chum I mean.”

He swam closer. Oh, this was fine. It wasn’t easy to find a forreal something like this to clobber her with. Mostly, she was so darn perfect, he had to make it up whole, like the time he told her her eyes weren’t the same color. Imagine, he thought,
they
get head-colds too! And then he thought, well, why not? “You mind your big bony bottom-feeding mouth,” he called cheerfully, “or I’ll curry your tail with a scaling-tool.” He could barely make her out, sprawled on the narrow seaward ledge—something piebald dark in the darkness. “Was that really you singin’ or are you sitting on a blowfish?”