Dark Benediction

“Well, you’re illuminated, youngster. Now what do you intend to do?”

Paul shook his head to scatter the confusion of ideas. “What can anyone do? Except run. To an island, perhaps.”

Seevers hoisted a cynical eyebrow. “Intend taking the condition with you? Or will you try to stay nonhyper?”

“Take… are you crazy? I mean to stay healthy!”

“That’s what I thought. If you were objective about this, you’d give yourself the condition and get it over with. I did. You remind me of a monkey running away from a hypodermic needle. The hypo has serum health-insurance in it, but the needle looks sharp. The monkey chatters with fright.”

Paul stalked angrily to the door, then paused. “There’s a girl upstairs, a dermie. Would you—”

“Tell her all this? I always brief new hypers. It’s one of my duties around this ecclesiastical leper ranch. She’s on the verge of insanity, I suppose. They all are, before they get rid of the idea that they’re damned souls. What’s she to you?”

Paul strode out into the corridor without answering. He felt physically ill. He hated Seevers’ smug bulldog face with a violence that was unfamiliar to him. The man had given the plague to himself! So he said. But was it true? Was any of it true? To claim that the hallucinations were new sensory phenomena, to pose the plague as possibly desirable—Seevers had no patent on those ideas. Every dermie made such claims; it was a symptom. Seevers had simply invented clever rationalizations to support his delusions, and Paul had been nearly taken in. Seevers was clever. Do you mean to take the condition with you when you go? Wasn’t that just another way of suggesting, “Why don’t you allow me to touch you?” Paul was shivering as he returned to the third floor room to recoat himself with the pungent oil. Why not leave now? he thought.

But he spent the day wandering along the waterfront, stopping briefly at the docks to watch a crew of monks scrambling over the scaffolding that surrounded the hulls of two small sea-going vessels. The monks were caulking split seams and trotting along the platforms with buckets of tar and paint. Upon inquiry, Paul learned which of the vessels was intended for his own use. And he put aside all thoughts of immediate departure.

She was a fifty-footer, a slender craft with a weighted fin-keel that would cut too deep for bay navigation. Paul guessed that the colony wanted only a flat-bottomed vessel for hauling passengers and cargo across from the mainland. They would have little use for the trim seaster with the lines of a baby destroyer. Upon closer examination, he guessed that it had been a police boat, or Coast Guard craft. There was a gun-mounting on the forward deck, minus the gun. She was built for speed, and powered by diesels, and she could be provisioned for a nice long cruise.

Paul went to scrounge among the warehouses and locate a stock of supplies. He met an occasional monk or nun, but the gray-skinned monastics seemed only desirous of avoiding him. The dermie desire was keyed principally by smell, and the deodorant oil helped preserve him from their affections. Once he was approached by a wild-eyed layman who startled him amidst a heap of warehouse crates. The dermie was almost upon him before Paul heard the footfall. Caught without an escape route, and assailed by startled terror, he shattered the man’s arm with a shotgun blast, then fled from the warehouse to escape the dermie’s screams.

Choking with shame, he found a dermie monk and sent him to care for the wounded creature. Paul had shot at other plague victims when there was no escape, but never with intent to kill. The man’s life had been spared only by hasty aim.

“It was self-defense,” he reminded himself.

But defense against what? Against the inevitable?

He hurried back to the hospital and found Mendelhaus outside the small chapel. “I better not wait for your boat,” he told the priest. “I just shot one of your people. I better leave before it happens again.”

Mendelhaus’ thin lips tightened. “You shot—”

“Didn’t kill him,” Paul explained hastily. “Broke his arm. One of the brothers is bringing him over. I’m sorry, Father, but he jumped me.”

The priest glanced aside silently, apparently wrestling against anger. “I’m glad you told me,” he said quietly. “I suppose you couldn’t help it. But why did you leave the hospital? You’re safe here. The yacht will be provisioned for you. I suggest you remain in your room until it’s ready. I won’t vouch for your safety any farther than the building.” There was a tone of command in his voice, and Paul nodded slowly. He started away.

“The young lady’s been asking for you,” the priest called after him.

Paul stopped. “How is she?”