Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth and tried to know why he was crying; for the tiredness, for the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and for the inevitable growth, which hurt so much…his body ached; his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn’t stop crying.
Iimmi, who had taken the bunk above Geo’s, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had not felt like eating.
“How’s your stomach?” Iimmi asked.
“Funny,” Geo said. “But better, I guess.”
“Good,” said Iimmi. “Food sort of weights you down, once it gets inside; sort of holds you down to earth.”
“I’ll eat something soon,” Geo said. He paused. “Now I guess you’ll never find out what you saw on the beach that made you dangerous.” The slosh of water on the hull outside was just audible; they were veering toward Leptar now.
Then Iimmi laughed. “I found what it was.”
“How?” asked Geo. “When? What was it?”
“Same time you did,” Iimmi said. “I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later.”
“When?” Geo repeated.
“I took a nap just before dinner and he went through the whole thing with me.”
“Then what was it you saw, we saw?”
“Well, first of all, do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?”
“Didn’t Argo say he was studying to be a priest? Old Argo, I mean.”
“Right,” said Iimmi. “Now, do you remember what your theory was about what we saw?”
“Did I have a theory?” Geo asked.
“About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was.”
“Oh, that,” Geo said. “I remember. Yes.”
“You were also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama’s lecture on the double impulse of life: sift together; mix well. It wasn’t a thing we saw; it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn’t have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, with his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. Take Hama’s theory one step further: each action is a reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all we’ve been through — the confusion, the pain, the disorder; reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more.”
“All right,” said Geo.
“And that’s what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning: chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos.”
“All right again,” Geo said. “And I’ll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor, as well as something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because he might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?”
“You picked just the right word.” Iimmi smiled. “Jordde was a novice in the not-too-liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had probably been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arching rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about anyplace, but can also project at least sound to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious or mystic or whatever you want to call it experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to be the voice of the Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?”
“I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing,” Geo said. “It would for me.”
“It did,” said Iimmi. “Jordde wasn’t what you’d call stable before that. If anything, this made him worse. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake, who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing-up process of a more or less active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson, slower this time. But the same thing. It’s apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch from the inside. That’s why he stopped reading Urson’s thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away the balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard; things like that, all of which were signs we didn’t see. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. But Hama’s information about the aims of the blind priestesses, to get the jewels for themselves, was something to hold on to for the boy: the second part of his impulse to serve Hama, the first part being the awful thing that had happened to Jordde’s mind at contact with the blind priestesses.”
“Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?”
“Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. Everything became equivocated with everything else. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God. He knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to ‘convert’ Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy’s tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire the blind Priestess had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a place sacred to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn’t want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of the Goddess also.”
“In other words, he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn’t want it to happen to anybody else.”
“That’s right.” Iimmi sat on the bunk’s edge. “Which is sort of understandable. They didn’t come in contact with any of the technology of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way.”
Geo leaned back. “I can see how the same thing almost…almost might have happened to me. If everything had been the same.”
Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when Geo slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his last thoughts, and surprisingly, things he mostly knew, about hate, a lot of hate, and about love.
Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, bright sunlight fell across his face. He had to squint. When he did so, he saw her sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas tarpaulin in one of the suspended lifeboats.
“Hi up there,” he called.
“Hi down there. How are you feeling?”
Geo shrugged.
Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and, with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, “Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something.”