More Than Human

‘I don’t want to know. I’m quite happy the way I am.’

‘Hell you are.’

I said nothing to that. I despise that kind of language.

‘Two things you want from me. Neither makes no sense.’ He looked at me with the first real expression I have ever seen in his face: a profound wonderment.’ You want to know all about me, where I came from, how I got to be what I am.’

‘Yes, I do want that. What’s the other thing I want that you know and I don’t?’

‘I was born some place and growed like a weed somehow,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Folks who didn’t give even enough of a damn to try the orphanage routine. So I just ran loose, sort of in training to be the village idiot. I’da made it, but I took to the woods instead.’

‘Why?’

He wondered why, and finally said, ‘I guess because the way people lived didn’t make no sense to me. Out here I can grow like I want.’

‘How is that?’ I asked over one of those vast distances that built and receded between him and me so constantly.

‘What I wanted to get from your books.’

‘You never told me.’

For the second time he said, ‘You learn, but you don’t think. There’s a kind of – well, person. It’s all made of separate parts, but it’s all one person. It has like hands, it has like legs, it has like a talking mouth, and it has like a brain. That’s me, a brain for that person. Damn feeble, too, but the best I know of.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No, I ain’t,’ he said, unoffended and completely certain. ‘I already got the part that’s like hands. I can move ‘em anywhere and they do what I want, though they’re too young yet to do much good. I got the part that talks. That one’s real good.’

‘I don’t think you talk very well at all,’ I said. I ca

He was surprised. ‘I’m not talking about me! She’s back yonder with the others.’

‘She?’

‘The one that talks. Now I need one that thinks, one that can take anything and add it to anything else and come up with a right answer. And once they’re all together, and all the parts get used together often enough, I’ll be that new kind of thing I told you about. See? Only – I wish it had a better head on it than me.’

My own head was swimming. ‘What made you start doing this?’

He considered me gravely. ‘What made you start growing hair in your armpits?’ he asked me. ‘You don’t figure a thing like that. It just happens.’

‘What is that… that thing you do when you look in my eyes?’

‘You want a name for it? I ain’t got one. I don’t know how I do it. I know I can get anyone I want to do anything. Like you’re going to forget about me.’

I said in a choked voice, ‘I don’t want to forget about you.’

‘You will.’ I didn’t know then whether he meant I’d forget, or I’d want to forget. ‘You’ll hate me, and then after a long time you’ll be grateful. Maybe you’ll be able to do something for me some time. You’ll be that grateful that you’ll be glad to do it. But you’ll forget, all right, everything but a sort of… feeling. And my name, maybe.’

I don’t know what moved me to ask him, but I did, forlornly. ‘And no one will ever know about you and me?’

‘Can’t,’ he said.’ Unless… well, unless it was the head of the animal, like me, or a better one.’ He heaved himself up.

‘Oh, wait, wait!’ I cried. He mustn’t go yet, he mustn’t. He was a tall, dirty beast of a man, yet he had enthralled me in some dreadful way. ‘You haven’t given me the other… whatever it was.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah, that.’

He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a… a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.

I came up out of it, through two distinct levels:

I am eleven, breathless from shock from a transferred agony of that incredible entrance into the ego of another. And:

I am fifteen, lying on the couch while Stern drones on, ‘… quietly, quietly limp, your ankles and legs as limp as your toes, your belly goes soft, the back of your neck is as limp as your belly, it’s quiet and easy and all gone soft and limper than limp…’

I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. ‘Okay,’ I said.

Stern looked a little a

‘It did work,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The whole thing. A to Z.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Like that.’

He looked at me piercingly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was right there, where you said. In the library. When I was eleven. When she said, „Baby is three.” It knocked loose something that had been boiling around in her for three years, and it all came blasting out. I got it, full force; just a kid, no warning, no defences. It had such a – a pain in it, like I never knew could be.’

‘Go on,’ said Stern.

‘That’s really all. I mean that’s not what was in it; it’s what it did to me. What it was, a sort of hunk of her own self. A whole lot of things that happened over about four months, every bit of it. She knew Lone.’

‘You mean a whole series of episodes?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You got a series all at once? In a split second?’

‘That’s right. Look, for that split second I was her, don’t you see? I was her, everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I’m going to tell you about what I had for lunch, do I have to tell you everything else I’ve ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I was her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash.’

‘A gestalt,’ he murmured.

‘Aha!’ I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, ‘Why didn’t I know all this before?’

‘You had a powerful block against recalling it.’

I got up excitedly.’ I don’t see why. I don’t see that at all.’

‘Just natural revulsion,’ he guessed. ‘How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second.’

‘You told me yourself, right at the begi

‘Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So – you wouldn’t go back into it for fear of re-experiencing the pain.’

‘Let me think, let me think. Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it – that thing of going into someone’s mind. She opened up to me because I reminded her of Lone. I went in. I wasn’t ready; I’d never done it before, except maybe a little, against resistance. I went all the way in and it was too much; it frightened me away from trying it for years. And there it lay, wrapped up, locked away. But as I grew older, the power to do that with my mind got stronger and stronger, and still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, down deep, that Miss Kew had to be killed before she killed the… what I am. My God!’ I shouted. ‘Do you know what I am?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Like to tell me about it?’

‘I’d like to,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, I’d like that.’

He had that professional open-minded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them.

Lone took the meanings and threw the words away.

Further back: ‘ You read books. Read books for me.’

The look of his eyes. That – ‘opening up’ thing.

I went over to Stern. He looked up at me, I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me.

‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels…’

Stern read books. He’d read more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted.