Eye of Cat Part 8

I know now that I can destroy you at any time, but I wish to prolong the pleasure. Keep running. I will strike at the most appropriate moment.

This makes no sense at all.

No. Because you will not let it. You are mine, hunter, whenever I choose.

Why?

He came onto a long, tree-lined curve. There seemed to be more lights far ahead.

I will tell you, and it will still not save you. You have changed from what you once were. I see that within you which was not there in the old days. Do you know what you realty want?

To beat you, Billy said. And I will.

No. Your greatest wish is to die.

That is not so!

,You have given up on the thought of keeping up with your world. For a long while you have waited and wished for an appropriate way out of it. I have provided you with such an occasion. You think that you are running from me. Actually, you are rushing toward me. You make it easy for me, hunter.

Not true!

...And the lovely irony is that you do not admit it.

You have been in the minds of too many Californians.

They're full of pop psychology...

... And your denial of it makes it that much easier for me.

You are trying to wear me down mentally. That's all.

No need for it.

You're bluffing. If you can strike now, let's see you do it.

Soon. Soon. Keep running.

He had to slow the vehicle for a series of turns. He continued to scan both sides of the trail. Cat must be near in order to reach him, but of course he had the advantage of straight-line travel whereas the trail - Exactly.

Overhead, s piece of the night came loose, dropping from the top of a high boulder which leaned from the right. He tried to brake and cut to the left simultaneously.

A ma.s.sive, jaguarlike form with a single, gleaming eye landed on the vehicle's hood forward and to the front. It was visible for but an instant, and then it sprang away.

The car tipped, its air cushion awry, and it was already turning onto its side before he left the trail. He fought with the wheel and the att.i.tude control, already knowing that it was too late. There came a strong shock accompanied by a crunching noise, and he felt himself thrown forward.

DEADLY, DEADLY, DEADLY...

Kaleidoscope turning... Shifting pattern within unalter- able structure... Was it a mistake? There is pain with the power... Time's friction at the edges... Center loosens, forms again elsewhere... Unalterable? But - Turn out- ward. Here songs of self erode the will till actions lie stillborn upon night's counterpane. But - Again the move- ment ... Will it hold beyond a catch of moment? To fragment... Not kaleidoscope. No center. But again...

To form it will. To will it form. Structure... Pain...

Deadly, deadly... And lovely. Like a sleek, small dog...

A plastic statue... The notes of an organ, the first slug of gin on an empty stomach... We settle again, farther than ever before... Center. The light!... It is difficult being a G.o.d. The pain. The beauty. The terror of selfless - Act! Yes.

Center, center, center... Here'! Deadly...

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HE AWOKE. TO STILLNESS AND.

the damp. The right side of his forehead was throbbing. His shoulders ached and he became aware of the unnatural angle at which he lay. His right arm felt wet. He opened his eyes and saw that the night still lay upon the land. He stretched out his left hand and turned on the interior light. As he did, shards of gla.s.s fell from his sleeve.

He saw then that the windshield was uncracked, and that the wetness on his arm had been caused by the spilled remainder of his coffee. He placed his fingertips on his forehead and felt no break in the skin, but he could already detect a swelling in the sore area.

The vehicle lay on its right side, off the trail, its front end partly crumpled against a tree. There were other trees and shrubs in the vicinity, masking him somewhat from the trail.

He looked upward and to his left, and he could discover no reason for the broken side window.

Then his gaze fell upon the headrest. There were four parallel slash marks in the covering material beside his head, as from a set of razor-sharp claws. He looked again at the broken side window. Yes...

Cat?

Silence.

What are you waiting for?

He swung his feet about, set them carefully against the far door and rose into the semblance 'of a standing position.

Immediately he grew dizzy and clutched at the steering wheel. When the spell pa.s.sed, he attempted to open the door. It yielded to his fourth effort with a grinding, sc.r.a.ping sound. He caught hold of the frame and drew himself upward, suddenly recalling having done something similar with an old blue pickup truck, coming home from a Sat.u.r.day night in town an age ago.

There was a trail. Even in the dark he could read it. Cat had been there and gone. He felt the broken twigs, traced impressions in the earth with his fingertips. He followed it

for perhaps twenty meters, heading off across the country- side. Then he rose and turned away.

What's your angle, Cat? What do you want now? he asked.

He heard only the wind. He walked slowly back to the roadway and continued along it. He was certain that only a few miles remained until he reached the town.

Perhaps ten minutes pa.s.sed. No other traffic had come along, but he suspected that he was not alone. A large body seemed to be moving far off among the trees to his left, pacing him.

All right, Cat, he said. There is no point to my taking evasive action now. If you are going to strike, strike. If not, enjoy the walk.

There was no response, and he broke into a jog.

A feeling of nausea came over him before he had gone far.

He ignored it and kept moving. He decided that it could be a reaction to the blow on his head.

But as he ran, his feelings came to include a fear that Cat was about to spring on him. He tried to thrust it away but it grew, and then he recognized its irrational roots.

I feel it, Cat. But I know what it is, he said. What's the point of it? I'm still going on to Kenmare, unless you kill me.

Are you just playing games?

The intensity of the feelings increased. His breathing grew ragged. He felt a sudden urge to urinate. A sense of immi- nent doom was upon the trail for as far ahead as he could see.

Something like a small dog crossed his path. In that instant, his apprehensions vanished.

Was that the shadow I saw in the woods? he wondered. Is Cat long gone? Was my fear real, rather than induced?

Or is it all your doing, Cat? Is it your plan to make me doubt myself, to break me before you destroy me?

He jogged for a mile before a floatcar approached from the rear and drew abreast of him. Its driver offered him a ride into town.

As they moved forward, Billy felt within him the distant laughter of his pursuer.

To get out, to go away, to think. These were his preoccu- pations as he came into the town. He needed to escape for even a short while to someplace where Cat could not ob-

serve the workings of his mind. It was necessary that he continue his flight, try yet again to blur the trail sufficiently to gain respite for a.n.a.lysis of the situation, for planning.

He had the driver drop him at the trip-station. He a.s.sumed that somewhere Cat was reading his mind to learn his destination. He began chanting softly in Navajo, a section of the Blessingway. He entered the station and moved toward a booth. The place's only occupant was an old man seated on a wooden bench against the side wall to his right. The man looked up from his news printout and nodded to him.

" 'Evening," the man said.

He entered the booth and pressed the coordinates for Victoria Station.

... in beauty.

Now to Munich...

... all about me.

He cleaned himself in the washroom there and tripped to Rome.

... to the right of me.

He had a sandwich and a gla.s.s of wine.

... to the left of me.

He tripped to Ankara. For a time, he stood outside the terminal and watched the sun rising upon a hot, dusty day.

... before me.

He tripped to Al Hillah in Saudi Arabia, and from there to a bank of booths in the Rab al Khali National Petroleum Forest.

Yes. Here, he decided, stepping forth among the great- leafed, towering trees, their barks scaled and brown and ringing in the wind. He followed a marked footpath through their shade.

Here, amid Freeman Dyson's old dream, he thought, he might be able to feel his way to something that he needed to know, here in what had once been known as the Empty Quarter, now an enormous forest of genetically tailored trees larger than redwoods, their sap rising, their pro- grammed metabolism synthesizing petroleum which flowed downward through a special set of vessels into roots which formed a living network of pipelines, connecting at various points to an artificial pipeline which conveyed it to the vast storage areas which const.i.tuted one of the world's great petroleum reserves, against those functions which still re- quired the substance. They filled what had once been a wasteland, utilizing the abundant sunlight available there.

Self-repairing and timeless against the blue of the sky, they- were both natural and the product of the technology which informed the planet's culture, as surely as the trees of the street parks which delivered their own products, or the data net which, had he not disa.s.sociated himself from it, could at this moment deliver to him almost any information he needed.

Almost. Some things had to be worked out alone. But here, in this combination of the old and the new; the primi- tive and the modern, he felt more at ease than he had since the entire business began. There were even birds singing in the branches....

He walked for a long while through the forest, pausing when he came to a small cleared area containing a pair of picnic tables, a waste bin, a shed. He looked into the shed: foresters' maintenance equipment - power diggers, pick- axes, saws; chains and cables; gloves and climbing spikes. It was dusty, and spiderwebs like gossamer bridges connected each to each.

He closed the door and moved away, sniffed the air and looked around. He seated himself with his back to the bole of a middle-sized tree, some few stalks of coa.r.s.e saffron and lime gra.s.s tufted about the hillock among the roots. He filled his pipe and lit it.

Cat wanted his death and had tried to convince him that he did, too. The idea seemed absurd, but he looked at it more closely. Much of the universe was one's adversary. He had learned that as a boy. One took precautions and hoped for the best. Time was flowing water, neither good nor evil and not to be grasped. One could cup one's hand and hold a little of it for a while, and that was all. It had become a torrent, though, in the past decade of his own life - which covered about thirty years of real time - and he could contain none of it. The big world had changed rapidly during that span. The dancers had exchanged masks; he could no longer identify the enemies.

Save for Cat.

But that was unfair, he saw, even to Cat. Cat he could understand. Cat was simple, monomaniacal, in his desire.

The rest of the world was dangerous in changing and compli- cated ways, though it generally lacked malice and premedi- tation. It was an adversary, not an enemy. Cat was the enemy. The universe was that which ground down and rolled over one. And now...

The tempo had increased. He had felt it all his life, from his first school days on, intensifying, like a drumbeat. There had been lapses, true; periods when he had come to terms with the new rhythms. But now - He felt tired. The last responses were no longer appropriate, not even among his own people. Looking back, he saw that he had felt best on those occasions when he had gone away, into the timeless places among the stars, hunting. It was the return that was always the shock. Now... now he just wanted to rest. Or to go away again, even though the next return...

Dora. It had been peaceful with Dora also. But that did not help him now. Thinking of Dora now only caused him to look away from the real problems. Did he really want to die?

Was Cat right?

He could almost hear singing within the unnatural tree which paralleled his backbone, vibrations humming along his nerves.

To want to run away, to want to rest and change no more ...Perhaps...

He bit down hard on the pipestem. He did not like all of this bellicano thinking, this hunting for hidden motives.

But...

Perhaps there was something to it. His jaw muscles re- laxed again.