Orbit 2

“I talked to the Herr Kruger a long time,” von Lankenau said, sitting down and clasping his long arms around his knees. “He told me much, and much of it about you, Mr. Kinross.”

“What about me?” Kinross asked, narrowing his eyes.

“The special relation between you. Something about the reciprocal way you and he came into this world. He does not understand it himself. But he knows that you should be his lieutenant among the people.”

Kinross said nothing. Von Lankenau regarded him gravely for a moment and continued, “I will cheerfully defer to your authority, Mr. Kinross, and help in any way I can.”

“I don’t want authority or responsibility,” Kinross said. “You go right on taking charge of things, Mr. Lankenau, only leave me out of it.”

“If I must, by your default, then I will. But I hope that I can consult with you.”

“Oh, by all means,” Kinross said. “I’m good at talking.” “Let us talk then. Do you know, Mr. Kinross, this situation is absolutely fascinating. Cannot you feel it set fire to your thoughts?”

“I know what you mean, I suppose. We’re tampering with some of the ultimate mysteries. I won’t deny I haven’t thought about them in my time and read strange books, too. But now I wonder. .”

“No moral qualms now, please, Mr. Kinross. You will only torment yourself uselessly like that unfortunate Portuguese. We have a world to build and it need not be a copy of the old one. We may be able to simplify the chemistry, systematize the mineralogy. . does not the thought intrigue you, Mr. Kinross?”

“Huh! You can’t beat the energy laws, Mr. Lankenau. The more people come in, the more closely they will apply. Kruger told me that himself, and I can see them taking hold already.”

“The Herr Kruger has never worshipped the Second Law. Otherwise none of us would be here. And most of the people who come in will not remain persons, you know.”

Von Lankenau turned a doubtful look on Garcia and continued, “That is another fascinating thing, to watch the personality elements filter back into external nature until the boundary between subject and object is almost lost. Think of what a power of mass suggestibility we will dispose of then! The very trees and rocks will be amenable to suggestion, each with its indwelling fragment of the human spirit! Oh, Kinross. . your Second Law. . your dry, word-smothered world. . this will be a world of magic for long ages before it becomes a world of science.”

Kinross frowned. “What right have we to disintegrate personalities in that way? Or to let it happen? Fay and Bo Bo—”

“Those two are special cases, sacrificed to an emergency that will not occur again. As for the others, we will devise a set of ritual life patterns that will stabilize them at some lower limit. That is what I and the Herr Kruger talked longest about.”

“Let me jump into this,” Garcia growled. “Do you birds think that’s going to happen to me? Suppose I won’t come apart for you, what then?”

“You may not be able to help it, Mr. Garcia. And perhaps you will be much happier when you do. . come apart.”

“You sound like Kruger. Kinross, what does he mean?”

“He means the emptiness of this world pulls you apart, like it or not. Like when you put a lump of salt in a cup of fresh water, it will dissolve a little at a time.”

“Emptiness? Not in the old world?”

“Only rarely, in places like the Antarctic, on a life raft at sea, empty places.”

“I see. Like in most places the old world is already so salty it can’t take more?”

“That’s the idea. The lumps of salt gain instead of losing.”

“Hmmm. Like we talked this morning. We used to push our devils off on each other.”

“Devils. That is the Herr Kruger’s analogy,” von Lan-kenau interrupted.

“Funny how I know just what he meant by it, without being able to say it any different,” Garcia said.

“You have to lose a few devils before you know,” Kinross told him.

“Well, I’ve lost some, okay. But I’m still Joe Garcia and my insides work.”

“Name magic is one of the oldest and most powerful means of binding one’s devils into a unity, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau assured him. “We will stabilize the villagers well above the name level, I hope.”

“Why do you and Kinross just take it for granted that you’re not in line for this. . this devil losing?”

“We are. We lose devils cheerfully, but it is a selective losing. I, and I suspect Mr. Kinross also, we hold ourselves together under a higher magic.”

“It’s like this, Garcia,” Kinross said, “you can either just plain be all your devils, or you can be yourself and carry a spare load of devils around with you.”

“Devils, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau said gravely, “are bits of experience, large or small, gay or mournful.”

“The lived experiences, good or bad, we bind in to ourselves,” Kinross said. “The unlived experiences, the regrets, the might-have-beens, the just-escaped things, we carry around on our backs. But we know it.”

“We’re really explaining to each other, aren’t we, Mr. Kinross?” said von Lankenau. “We lose the devils which ride us and we keep the ones which power us. The villagers must lose both kinds indiscriminately.”

“I’m still with you,” Garcia said. “Keep talking.”

“To draw on your earlier analogy, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau said, “might I say that devils exert an osmotic pressure? It is strongly outward on mountaintops and in such places I have shrugged off a thousand devils. But in Berlin or Paris. . back they came in tens of thousands.”

“That I savvy,” Garcia said. “It’s the difference between being on a long cruise and coming ashore for a month. I get a burn on me to ship out.”

“I think you’re okay, Garcia,” Kinross said. “If you weren’t, you would’ve already drifted off like Kerbeck.”

“Is not Kerbeck magnificent?” von Lankenau asked. “The end product of devil dispersion, an elemental force, with powers we hardly dare guess at. The Bo Bo thing, too, black and savage. Mr. Kinross, we pay a price for mind. But we must not let it happen to our villagers.”

“No, I guess not,” Kinross agreed. “You spoke of rituals. .”

“Yes, a pattern of group rituals to take them through their days and nights, perhaps later through seasons. We will keep them in a mass, maintain a local concentration of devils by mutual reenforcement or successive recapture… I don’t know quite how to phrase it.”

“I see. The thought disturbs me, Mr. Lankenau.”

“It need not. I find it exhilarating. I hope that you and Mr. Garcia will help.” Von Lankenau stood up and looked toward the hut-building activity.

“We’ll think about it,” Kinross said, getting up himself.

“I’ll do what I can,” the Mexican said. Lankenau excused himself and went over to the villagers.

“Kinross, something tells me you’re still packing a devil as big as the Queen Mary, for all of your brains,” Garcia said.

Krugertown, as they called it, was built in a day. Mary had a large hut of wattle and daub, near the stone-banked communal fire and a little apart from the village cluster, which lay nearer to the dark grove and the cave entrance. Kinross and Garcia built themselves a similar shelter a short way downstream from the fire. Von Lankenau lived in the village. Every morning Kinross and Garcia took a few bananas or a breadfruit to the cairn. Afterward Garcia often helped von Lankenau with the villagers, but Kinross walked apart with mixed feelings. He climbed about the hillsides, heedless of the growing number of black things and gray women that lurked there. Sometimes he saw Kerbeck, endlessly pursuing the dwarfs and the smoke women, and tried to talk to him. He tried to tell Kerbeck what Kruger had done to him in taking away his humanity. The massive Swede buzzed and hummed and Kinross did not know how much he understood.