Destiny had stirred a million years before and a shaggy ape thing had stooped and picked up a broken stick. It stirred again and struck flint together. It stirred once more and there was a bow and arrow. Again, and the wheel was born.
Destiny whispered and a thing climbed dripping from the water and in the years to come its fins were legs and its gills were nostrils.
Symbiotic abstractions. Parasites. Call them what you would. They were destiny.
And the time had come for the galaxy to know of destiny.
If parasites, then beneficial parasites, ready to give more than they could take. For all they got was the sense of living, the sense of being…and what they gave, or stood ready to give, was far more than mere living.
For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated unintelligence that crept through nauseous jungle worlds.
But because of them someday an angleworm might be more than an angleworm…or a greater angleworm. The bloated unintelligence might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man.
For every thing that moved, whether slow or fast, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.
And sometimes destiny took a hold and caught…and sometimes it didn't. But where there was destiny there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.
No thing walks alone.
Nor crawls nor hops nor swims nor flies nor shambles.
One planet barred to every mind but one and, once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.
One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.
That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.
Lord help me now.
For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been I, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.
It is too much to ask, he thought…too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man's, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.
But destiny put the finger on me.
Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck…it would be destiny.
I lived with destiny, as destiny…I was a part of destiny instead of destiny being a part of me, and we came to know each other as if we were two humans…better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.
I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand…the part of me I still do not understand…until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body and a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and the flimsy structure of the human body.
And when they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before…many things, I suspect, I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I'll never know about.
When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again, but now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together and I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.
Symbiosis, Sutton told himself, a higher symbiosis than the symbiosis of heather with its fungus or the primitive animal with its alga. A mental symbiosis. I am the host and Johnny is my guest and we get along together because we understand each other. Johnny gives me an awareness of my destiny, of the operative force of destiny that shapes my hours and days, and I give Johnny the semblance of life that he could not have through his existence independently.
"Johnny," he called and there was no answer.
He waited and there was no answer.
"Johnny," he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.
Unless…unless…the thought struck him slowly, kindly. Unless he were really dead. Unless this were dreaming, unless this were a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.
Johnny's voice was small, very small and very far away.
"Ash."
"Yes, Johnny."
"The engines, Ash. The engines."
He fought his body out of the pilot's chair, stood on weaving legs.
He could scarcely see…just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were leaden weights that he could not move…that were no part of him at all.
He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.
Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.
There had been strength, a surge of strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength was vengeance.
But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of brain, the strength of will rather than of mere bone and muscle that had let him do it.
He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more and his head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood and mucus and slobbered stomach slime that left a trail across the floor.
He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.
His fingers found the latch and pulled it down, but they had no strength and they slipped off the metal and he fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.
He waited for a long time and then he tried again and this time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again, and as he fell, he fell across the threshold.
Finally, after so long a wait that he thought he could never do it, he got on hands and knees again and crept forward by slow inches.
XXX
Asher Sutton awoke to darkness.
To darkness and an unknowing.
To unknowing and a slow, exploding wonder.
He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped in his arms, with his body pressed against it, as a child might sleep with a beloved Teddy bear.
There was no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.
He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it, and he lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.
But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side…and it was thus for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped into his consciousness without conscious effort, as if it were a thing he had known all the time, and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition and that, he thought, was strange.