He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the world of Cygni VII lay beneath his hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he'd done.
The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his visionplate.
It was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the gray fog of his mind, as if it were yesterday or this very moment.
He reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising panic that exploded into fear.
One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact…he was about to crash.
He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear or terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting.
Awareness came back…in a moment or an aeon — which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which it seemed he had held forever.
He sensed or knew, for it was not seeing, his body stretched out on the ground, smashed and broken, twisted out of human shape. And although he knew it was his body and knew its every superficial function and the plan of its assembly, he felt a twinge of wonder at the thing which lay there and knew that here was a problem which would tax his utmost ingenuity.
For the body must be put together, must be straightened out and reintegrated and co-ordinated so that it would work and the life that had escaped it be returned to it again.
He thought of Humpty Dumpty and the thought was strange, as if the nursery rhyme were something new or something long forgotten.
Humpty Dumpty, said another part of him, supplies no answer, and he knew that it was right, for Humpty, he recalled, could not be put together.
He became aware there were two of him, for one part of him had answered the other part of him. The answerer and the other, and although they were one, they were also separate. There was a cleavage he could not understand.
I am your destiny, said the answerer. I was with you when you came to life and I stay with you till you die. I do not control you and I do not coerce you, but I try to guide you, although you do not know it.
Sutton, the small part of him that was Sutton, said, "I know it now."
He knew it as if he'd always known it and that was queer, for he had only learned it. Knowledge, he realized, was all tangled up, for there were two of him…he and destiny. He could not immediately distinguish between the things he knew as Sutton alone and those he knew as Sutton plus Sutton's destiny.
I cannot know, he thought. I could not know then and I cannot know now. For there still is deep within me the two facets of my being, the human that I am and the destiny that guides me to a greater glory and a greater life if I will only let it.
For it will not coerce me and it will not stop me. It will only give me hunches, it will only whisper to me. It is the thing called conscience and the thing called judgment and the thing called righteousness.
And it sits within my brain as it sits within the brain of no other thing, for I am one with it as is no other thing. I know of it with a dreadful certainty and they do not know at all or, if they do, they only guess at the great immensity of its truthfulness.
And all must know. All must know as I know.
But there is something going on to keep them from knowing, or to twist their knowledge so their knowing is all wrong. I must find out what it is and I must correct it. And somehow or other I must strike into the future, I must set it aright for the days I will not see.
I am your destiny, the answerer had said.
Destiny, not fatalism.
Destiny, not foreordination.
Destiny, the way of men and races and of worlds.
Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living…the way it was meant to be, the way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads.
But if you did not listen…why, then, you did not listen and you did not hear. And there was no power that could make you listen. There was no penalty if you did not listen except the penalty of having gone against your destiny.
There were other thoughts or other voices. Sutton could not tell which they were, but they were outside the tangled thing that was he and destiny.
That is my body, he thought. And I am somewhere else. Someplace where there is no seeing as I used to see…and no hearing, although I see and hear, but with another's senses and in an alien way.
The screen let him through, said one thought, although screen was not the word it used.
And another said, The screen has served its purpose.
And another said that there was a certain technique he had picked up on a planet, the name of which blurred and ran and made a splotch and had no meaning at all so far as Sutton could make out.
Still another pointed out the singular complexity and inefficiency of Sutton's mangled body and spoke enthusiastically of the simplicity and perfection of direct energy intake.
Sutton tried to cry out to them for the love of God to hurry, for his body was a fragile thing, that if they waited too long it would be past all mending. But he could not say it and as if in a dream he listened to the interplay of thought, the flash and flicker of individual opinion, all molding into one cohesive thought that spelled eventual decision.
He tried to wonder where he was, tried to orient himself, and found that he could not even define himself. For himself no longer was a body or a place in space or time, nor even a personal pronoun. It was a hanging, dangling thing that had no substance and no fixture in the scheme of time and it could not recognize itself no matter what it did. It was a vacuum that knew it existed and it was dominated by something else that might as well have been a vacuum for all the recognition he could make of it.
He was outside his body and he lived. But where or how there was no way of knowing.
I am your destiny, the answerer that seemed a part of him had said.
But destiny was a word and nothing more. An idea. An abstraction. A tenuous definition for something that the mind of Man had conceived, but could not prove…that the mind of Man was willing to agree was an idea only and could not be proved.
You are wrong, said Sutton's destiny. Destiny is real although you cannot see it. It is real for you and for all other things…for every single thing that knows the surge of life. And it has always been and it will always be.
This is not death? asked Sutton.
You are the first to come to us, said destiny. We cannot let you die. We will give you back your body, but until then you will live with me. You will be part of me. And that is only fair, for I have lived with you; I have been part of you.
You did not want me here, said Sutton. You built a screen to keep me out.
We wanted one, said destiny. One only. You are that one; there will be no more.
But the screen?
It was keyed to a mind, said destiny. To a certain mind. The kind of mind we wanted.
But you let me die.
You had to die, destiny told him. Until you died and became one of us you could not know. In your body we could not have reached you. You had to die so that you would be freed and I was there to take you and make you part of me so you would understand.
I do not understand, said Sutton.
You will, said destiny. You will.
And I did, thought Sutton, remembering. I did.
His body shook as he remembered and his mind stood awed with the vast, unsuspected immensity of destiny…of trillions upon trillions of destinies to match the teeming life of the galaxy.