Man of the World by Robert Gibson

34: judgement

Shock, pain – intensified, then ebbed.
  He lay wondering at the sky, while feet pounded on the pavement and he heard tardy yells. The shooters must have faded from view; then faces loomed down at him. Hushed faces, at first. Voices: doubtless the wagging tongues of doctors and police. A stretcher crew, visible out of the corner of his eye. Well, he was going to be taken care of. He had, it seemed, survived an assassination attempt.
  Surprising that the government's hit-men should botch it like this…
  The stretcher crew stepped into position around him. They bent, they straightened; mildly he noticed that their actions did not seem to alter his own position at all. Odd! He was picked up – and yet he wasn’t.
  Lying there, he watched them cart his body away.
He was no longer with his own flesh. And yet he was. He still felt solid.  He lay and continued to watch, quietly drained by bemused wonder, as the bearers loaded the stretcher into the ambulance.
  The sombre crowd, having watched the ambulance being loaded, dispersed after it drove off. With ambulance gone and bystanders gone, he was left still on the ground, well and truly alone in the silence and the emptiness of the square.
Since (as far as he could tell) he had gone on lying on the spot where he had fallen, despite having been carried away from it, and since he could not absorb this contradiction or do anything about it, he might make an effort, at least, to prop himself up on one elbow.
  “Well?” he rasped out loud, suddenly aware that not everyone had gone; that two figures, clad in silver, had approached from behind him.
  They answered him, not with words, but by hauling him up, and this time he did feel he was being moved.
  They had a stretcher of their own, different from that of the ambulance crew; it was as silver as they were, and his eyes watered a bit at its shine as they lifted him on. “Hey,” he whispered, “I feel no hurts.”
  A chuckle drifted over the shoulder of the bearer in front. “You’re more than just wounded, mate.” It was, apparently, amusing. A great lightness seeped through Midax: a floating, powerless resignation. Delegate worries away, pass ’em up to the haze of sky! For the beyond had at last reached him, and with no effort on his part, after a lifetime of failed stumblings after the truth. So he might as well have not bothered; the truth, whatever it was, had come to him unforced.
  “Don’t worry,” the front Bearer remarked, part-turning his head, “it’s nothing unusual, just luminal ecdysis, or ‘death’ as you call it; does a moulting lizard want its old skin back?”
  “Stop teasing him, Snennd,” advised the other as they carted him along.
  “You’re new to this duty, Ervar,” retorted the other. “Else you’d know, they like being teased. Besides, it tones them for what comes next.”
  Midax wasn’t listening very well. This was a time for wonder, not words. No matter what these two jokers said, he was wonderfully whole; shot yet unharmed. If this was death, he could live with it! More deeply he suspected that that this quip must miss the point; you can be stared at for a long time and not see the staring face, even though you’re looking straight at it, if it is hidden in a tangle of other lines, as in those trick-pictures in a puzzle-book where the stare may hide in a patch of long grass or a disorderly rubbish tip with its competing jumbles of shapes, so that when you do finally notice the face the double-take is all the sharper because you realize not only that it is there but also that it has been staring at you for some minutes. It thus dawned on Midax, after some minutes of being carried in near silence above the soft tread of the silver bearers, that the change was not making itself known the way he had imagined it would. It was not his own body, it was the world of everyday that was becoming less and less convincing.  He was a slow Discoverer this time. Impressions of the world he knew – blurred, streaky scenes; prairie vistas, trees, roads, farms smeared in a watercolour wash that smudged past him, then flew past him, too fast to believe – deceived him for a while almost into believing that this could be some ordinary journey; yet really he knew that the silver-garbed Bearers could not be walking. They must be – what? Flying? Flowing? No, they were, after all, just walking, but not through the stuff of everyday. That stuff was at last fading for good, while the harder facts of Glight showed through like bones under shrivelling flesh. And this was happening no longer through any action of his, but because they were what was real. Thus, more and more, with each glimpse allowed by Midax’s lolling head, reality was revealing itself without the need for “Discovery”.
  The moment came when the everyday world was gone, not only from sight but from belief, and the glitter of Glight was none other than the face of truth. From that moment, the word “G-l-i-g-h-t” ceased to be needed. It was just how things really are. This dim pocket universe, furred with mirrors, bounded in a box a mere few miles in length, was simply what was. Or as much as he knew of what was.
Strange, but endurable. A flush of timid, wondering gratitude spread through Midax Rale as he found that he was not, after all, being bullied by ultimates, verdicts or terminations; his self had crossed a line, a profound line, but without agony, and without any hideous revelation.  It was just as well that he could bear the transition, for never had he been so powerless. That life could slough away so easily, that all its lavish embroidery could unravel in a moment like a loose stitch, was the most stupendous relief to a helpless man.
  Life, give it credit, had been successful in its way. A masterpiece of illusion. A fibre woven of mirror rays, giving him touches, memories, which he could take with him now into the unknown. But illusion, however brilliant it had been, lacked substance, and even the most bright and splendid aspects of “life” failed, somehow, to measure up to this present dim parade. As he was carried on his final journey through the frosty interior of the box-realm, he sensed a sturdiness in the landscape, each glint so pregnant with undisclosed meaning, that he felt the weight of future understanding, of answers yet untold but which would soon be told.  Yes, every step of the Bearers was a giant stride closer to the Whatever. By the same token he was also well aware that he what he could now see – a frost of mirrors coating the inside of a box-scape – could not quite be that final answer; but though he wasn’t quite there yet, at least one huge barrier of mental clutter (the so-called “everyday world”) had been removed from consideration, bringing him closer to what must be really real.
Then came the extra shock:
  Midax was not only bodily recumbent on the stretcher, his thoughts were flattened too, spread-eagled and suddenly aghast in the realization that his character was now laid out for inspection. Why and how he knew this, he could not tell, but every stage and deed of his life was exposed as if on a microscope slide, to be read by any high and mighty thing who might choose to look. He guessed that he would not be experiencing this feeling, if an Assessment did not await him.
  Too late for any more exam-revision.  Too late to embellish his portfolio of achievements.  He was a chopped tree that must lie as it falls…
  Trees – logs – floated to the saw-mill – now did he feel fear?
Not quite; only the topside of fear. It was an emotional cloud which would look dark if you viewed it from below, but nice and bright when you view it from above. All right then, be exalted and view it from above! Relax, now that it’s too late! Relax, now that you can’t make any more decisions! Enjoy being helpless – for to be helpless is to be liberated from duty and from choice.
  Besides, thought Midax, he wasn’t the only one –
  This thought gave him a crumb of ignoble comfort – that what had happened to him must also happen at some point to everyone, and if he was in trouble, he was in good company. He imagined, for instance, Pjerl Lhared with all her moods and inconsistent attitudes laid out for inspection. Hey, that would be interesting. At some point, might the authorities allow him to consult their records? The answer to the mystery of the way she had treated him…might then become available! But better stop obsessing about that now. It was a side-issue, anyway, compared with his own impending doom. Better reflect on that!
  Reflect on it he did, with a newly objective compassion that was no longer self-pity in the reprehensible sense; he estimated that he had done something between his best and his worst, and the powers that be, the Assessors, whoever they were, who would judge what he had done, weren’t his enemies, surely? He would get a fair assessment, surely? And as for the question, Pass or fail? – it was out of his hands now.
  He croaked, “Where are you taking me?”
  “The Portal.”
  Such a normal human voice, the Bearer had – the voice of a man striding, business-like, towards an attainable target: the ease of this voice invited Midax to feel at home.
  A home he did not know. Or did not realize he knew. He raised his head for just one muscle-straining moment and wondered: what was that smudge over there? Might he have glimpsed a hazy rectangle? Sky-scraper-sized, something loomed, perhaps a half-mile away.
  He asked, “The Gate of the World?”
  “Not a bad name for it,” agreed the Bearer.
  Midax wanted to ask more, but he found that to speak was costing him a huge effort. He preferred to use what energy he had to lift his head, every so often, to observe.
  During the last couple of minutes the Bearers had carried him along a knobbly ridge roughly the size of a railway embankment which, no doubt, played the part of a great mountain chain somewhere in far-western Larmonn. Now they reached a point where the “ridge” fell away to reveal another path converging towards their own, and on this path, ahead of them, shuffling more slowly in the same direction, was another group of Bearers: four of them, carrying two stretchers, side by side.
  Leisurely greetings were exchanged, between Midax’s Bearers, Ervar and Snennd, and the others, Tjeps, Sjalsk, Imas and Brenbl.
  Midax tried to gather strength, so that he might lift his head far enough to see who lay in the other stretchers.
  Wincing with the effort, he managed a look – then thumped back.
  “Hey,” chided Snennd, “no need to strain your neck! You’ll learn your score soon enough – that’s all you need think about.”
  Midax hardly heard the mild rebuke. His mind was full of the sight of the old man and woman being carried alongside him. He had been acquainted with them – they were the Port Authority staff block caretakers, Xanesif and Xanemilb Gno.
  To meet them here was uncanny reassurance! The Gnos, brother and sister, those old fixtures! Having outlived their spouses, they had returned to live and work together in their declining years as resident janitors, their rooms at the end of the corridor quite close to his own, in the days when he had lived in the Block. Now as he approached the Gate of the World in their company, he marvelled at the mercy of fate. To allow him this after-sensation of Everyday – how wonderfully kind, this ballast of ordinariness.
  The old man could be heard quavering to his sister: “Did you see that? The chap in the other stretcher!”
  In reply, Xanemilb piped feebly, “Our neighbour…?”
  “Yes! Tall fellow with the dry voice…”
  “Isn’t he something famous…?” she wheezed.
  “I think you’re right,” mumbled Xanesif.
  Midax’s labouring lungs pumped out: “Hello there! Hello!” – desperately anxious not to dither, while every moment was bringing them closer to the Portal and possible separation. “Glad to see you – ah, I mean, when I say ‘glad’…” he hesitated. Was it a stupid thing to have said?
  Old Xanesif seemed to understand. Gazing at the sky he mused in a cracked whisper, “Kind of comforting to see a neighbour.”
  The stretchers were close enough for Midax to catch these words. He whispered humbly, “Thanks. Good that you see it that way.”
  Good, too, that they hadn’t whooped at who he was. The less his deeds were noticed, the better. He might then escape their import. If everybody no longer noticed…
  Fat chance of that, stupid, he told himself. The powers that be – call them the Height – must know who he was; must know that he was the meddling Discoverer… the presumptuous explorer who had taken it upon himself to figure out the Higher Dimension. Oh brother, talk about sticking one’s neck out. But, on the other hand, they could hardly accuse him of succeeding. He had failed, hadn’t he? That should count in his favour: that he had completely failed to find out what was going on. And maybe he had so abjectly failed that they had not even noticed his attempt. Sure, they had come for him; but sooner or later they came for everyone…
  He wondered what the Bearers thought of the conversation they had overheard; he was grateful that they had not interrupted it.
  Now the grey rectangle of the Portal had become distinctly sharper in outline…

So far, Midax’s guts had behaved themselves on this trip. Drugged by the wonder of it all, he had been too stupefied to panic. But now Fear was clearing its throat. It was about to say its piece.
The only evasive action possible under the circumstances had to be taken, right now, and Midax took it: which is to say, his mind simply shied away from that approaching Portal. His attention bounced from it, using its tallness as a springboard, to emphasize that the sky was taller still. The lofty generous sky, the good, encouraging sky – so what if it’s scraped, must it not still over-arch? For that very reason, a skyscraper should merge with it in grandness and be kind to supine things.
  However, the disturbing grey structure was drawing so close that it became impossible to minimise by that sort of argument, for unlike the friendly sky the Portal, solid and immediate, possessed an ominous door - which forced Midax’s mind to change tactics. Try irreverence, he told himself. Say that the Portal is shaped like a shower cubicle. But come to think of it, that line of thought was not much use either; “shower” made him think of a rain of truth and judgement, a downpour from the Height. Well, he was in for it, no doubt; but if old Gno and his sister could stay calm, so, surely, could the great Discoverer.
  After all, the situation must be considerably worse for the two old folk. He at least had had some experience of being “stretched” outside the dimension of everyday. They, in their obscure conventional lives, could hardly have had any opportunity to prepare for this encounter…
  He ought therefore to use their stalwart example to stiffen his own backbone. And with this thought, Midax was overwhelmed with a need to exchange some words with the old couple.
  “Hey, Xanesif,” he hissed across the gap to the stretcher beside his, “tell me, what do you see?”
  “Um,” said the old man, “mountains… blurry, going fast…” (Ah, thought Midax, he’s still got his sight in Everyday-mode; to him it must still seem as though we are being transported at a swift rate through western Larmonn.) But then Xanesif gasped out in altered style, “But in front of me I see the Hall of Judgement getting closer!”
  “De-briefing laboratory,” Midax snapped back, this being his elbow-shove against dread, and with another irreverent dodge he picked an ally, called indignation. Experiment on him, would they? Yeah, he must have been the subject of a long experiment now reaching its end. He snacked on that idea for a few minutes, while the Portal neared. Then his head lolled back as the stretcher bearers began to mount the steps before the towering frontage. Now he had room only for a different thought, that it was just as well that he wasn't seeing the building in the way Xanesif and Xanemilb were most likely seeing it as it had been depicted in mythic style in innumerable simplistic popular icons: a post-mortem Judgement Hall. A lab wasn't a court. Or was it?
The sky was cut away as the Hall swallowed them.  They waited a few moments in a dim, humming space.
An inner door slid aside, and the veneer of education, which had enabled Midax briefly to resist the terrors of finality, was wiped away. He did try to think: “Science. Engineering.” But it mattered little.
  True, his retina registered a moderately sized, gadgety-cramped interior chamber with a high-backed central chair surrounded by tubes and dials, with some modest room to stand in front of the chair. But he also felt the stroke of a brain-brush dipped in meaning, the brush dragged across his line of sight to gloss his view with so heavy a significance that he had little attention left for the literal sizes and shapes which met his eyes. The pipe things, hoods, switches and technical stuff, all were sinuously transformed by the myth they were about to enact. Judgement was myth and real.
  A seafarer who has just stepped onto dry land from a heaving deck and still feels the ground under him swaying is making a true physical statement about the power of those waves which are no longer under him; exactly so did Midax’s inner eye continue the job of the conditioning he had received in the box world of Everyday. Only in a limited sense had Everyday been a lie: the ubiquitous system of mirrors which had corrugated Longlight into Shortlight had stuffed that world with a width it did not really have, but the overlap of feelings which now created for him an immensely wider hall, a fearsome immensity dominated by the Judge’s Throne, was no lie. He was here, in this shadowy place, to be judged.
  Hands steadied him as he was tipped out of the stretcher.
  He stood up, alone in his allotted space. The Bearers waited nearby, ready to prop him if he showed signs of falling.
  A mild, supreme voice called, “Next - Xanesif Gno, approach.”
  Thank goodness, I’m not first to go up. Not my turn yet.
  Midax jerked his head to see the old man totter forward and dimly stoop before the Throne.
  Now it became a little clearer, that a robed figure sat upon the Throne. A voice boomed from somewhere in that direction, though Midax could not make out the words, perhaps because they were not meant for him. Minutes of suspense dragged by during which, as best he could, he watched Xanesif and the Judge. Then, plainly, Xanesif sagged – but whether in relief or despair, it was hard to tell.  Next, his sister Xanemilb went forward, while her brother was led away into some hazy background. She stumbled into place, to take her turn to be Judged. The case of Xanemilb Gno did not take more than a few more moments to decide. Again, it was not possible for the wider audience (others apart from Midax had now been brought in) to catch what was being said.  Xanemilb, having heard her score, was led away.
The mild power spoke: "Next! Midax Rale, approach."
At all costs he must not falter. To keep himself steady he re-opened the tap of his irreverent and vaporous thoughts, lightly to wonder whether the Height – like a skilled receptionist – had deliberately called for the simpler cases first. Then he hopped fuzzily to the idea that he was like a rock sample due to be sliced in a geology lab, so that lights would be shone through him and he would be scrutinized for his properties, all impersonal, no right or wrong answers, no condemnation; for surely this “judgement” must merely be a record, and the “verdict” a categorisation, to slot the results somewhere automatically. What else could this “judge” do but operate the machinery which bulked around here? It couldn’t be a moral judgement. Midax peered into the gloom as he came to the foot of the Throne. He lifted his eyes; he tried to make out the features and the expression of the authority who sat there. The Height: so hard to see… But something clicked.
Midax’s outer and inner eye went cubist, a dream composed of planes. Well, hadn’t he sort of guessed during the stretcher-ride, what he was in for? He was now stretched out in planes, mirror-like planes, in which all his thoughts, memories, motives and intentions were exhibited for the Judge to see.  Stabbing through all this came a command from above.
  “Wait! Stop the test!”
  Midax shuddered at the change, the abrupt rasp of that voice.
  It went on in its new tone with words that sounded like “un-match, un-match…” and a gobble of other phrases. Midax’s sense of guilt became overpowering. What he was hearing, though in jargon, was comprehensible tonally; his uneasy conscience enabled him to guess that he faced something worse than adverse judgement; he was being charged with spoliation of the system itself.
  They've got me dead to rights.
  Another click and his “cubist” sight was fully restored to normal, he stood staring at the now visible occupant of the Throne, and - he remembered!
  From the other side of a vanished lifetime, the memory gesticulated at him, and he moved his lips in reply, telling himself that it was ‘only’ Jaekel, after all. But nothing could be the same as it used to be. A surreal conversation followed. Midax had to listen; he could hear it all.
  Judge Jaekel, sidelong, questioned an assistant. “This one - couldn’t we have given him longer?”
  “We had to bring him back early. We couldn’t allow his cheatings to taint a whole batch –”
  “I thought the last report said that Midax Rale was lying low, harmlessly.” Silence. Jaekel went on, “Well? Snennd?” (Leaning forward at Snennd, the Judge was revealed in three-quarter face. Crushing responsibilities and continual strain made her seem, in that moment, more like a gnarled and overloaded tree than a human being.)
  “Apparently he wasn’t lying low enough,” shrugged Snennd.
  Icily the Judge said, “I was not informed of the demand for recall –”
  “Admin apologizes.”
  “What went wrong?”
  “Perhaps some of us, like he himself, thought he was lying low, but we were wrong,” winced Snennd; “for merely by continuing to live, he had become a focus of too much turbulence. The Assigner therefore felt compelled to issue a recall, loth though he is to admit failure in any trainee. What else can you expect, when a lifer manages to see straight from the inside? Rale saw dead straight – why, we don’t know.”
  “Perhaps,” mused Jaekel, “a Splasher was bound to do it some day. But in such a case I, like Alsair, am loth to pronounce.”
  “He has a right to be assessed objectively.”
  “Even if he has no chance?”
  “Even if he has no chance.”
  The Judge looked thoughtfully at the Stretcher-Bearer.
  Both of them, thought Midax with crazy insight, are mucking in, arguing, not just going by the book, whatever the book may be… for my case can’t be covered by the rules!
  Snennd reiterated: “No matter how inevitable the result – assess him! He deserves his record. Better to be a failure than a nobody.”
  “Well…” mused the Judge.
  Midax’s lightheaded thoughts cackled, Both in the world and out of it, I am a nuisance to everybody. The indictments that had poured in his direction, the past one from President Waretik Thanth of Everyday and the present one from Jaekel here, poured into one mighty channel of condemnation. I guess the rules have got me after all.
  Jaekel sighed, “Proceed.” The test resumed. The cubist mode of sight took hold again. With it Midax heard, or felt, a throbbing in his own patch of floor, and in the pipes all around him.
  Meanwhile the seated Judge stared into an instrument board that had descended in front of her eyes, and her hands grasped studs, whereupon Midax’s optic nerve flashed him lights while through his head ran thoughts too rapid for him to catch; he could only taste the confessional flavour they left behind, after he had mind-blabbed his inmost views and opinions.  Then, he did begin to glean what the superfast questions had been about.
  They had measured one particular reflex in his personality:
  The strength of the urge to join up dots, eke out flashes, link lines, fill in blank spaces, get by, do without, make a few count as many, make do with less.
  Well, that’s why I was sent in there in the first place, I remember now. Making do with less – that’s training for Sparseworld.
  More and more understanding was on its way…
  Somehow he had the impression that he wasn’t doing too badly in the basic citizenship-test stuff. But unfortunately that’s not all. My crossing of the Zard Pond – sorry, the Zard Ocean – oh dear me…
  That wasn’t “making do with less”.
  He could guess the gist of what was coming next. All he could do would be to smile his sweetest smile –
  He turned down his attention to a lower setting. The gurgle of subdued sense impression was all he could risk. For now the dry voice of the Judge confirmed his doom.
  “You have failed the test, Midax Rale. You used your abilities to nullify the purpose of your training. In a more leisurely age, we might have sent you back for another try. But the great Winter is falling upon Sycrest and we have no time for troublesome exceptions. Sorry. Next!”