[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
visions when you were a child?"
"Hallucinations, you mean?"
"Let's call them visions. Your first attack of stigmata
occurred when you were five. You were in church with your
mother. The statue of the crucified Christ fascinated you.
You suddenly saw it as a real man, not a carved wooden
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
figure who was suspended by nails from a cross and whose
blood was merely paint. You screamed."
"I still don't know what scared me."
"That's not vitally important. Immediately after you
screamed, blood welled from your hands and feet and on
your forehead. You became hysterical, your mother, also.
Then ..."
"Then there was the man I saw floating by my bedroom
window when I was four!" Jim said. "And the naked green
man I saw out in our garden six months later. He was eating
the ears of corn! I yelled for Mom, but when she came, the
green man was gone! I got whipped by my father for lying!
But I did see that man! I did!"
"How do you feel about the vision you had just before
you passed out in your burning house?" the doctor said.
"You were naked and chained to a tree and a giant sickle
was about to castrate you. Also, what are your feelings
about the vision you had of the man-serpent?"
"They were prophetic. They predicted what was going to
happen when I was in Ore. Sort of, anyway. They were
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
mixed up, but their elements were true. They did happen."
"I didn't ask you if you thought they were true or what
their psychological explanation was. I asked you how you
feel when you think of them."
"For Christ's sake, Doctor!" Jim burst out. "I don't feel
259
PHILIP JOSE FARMER
RED ORC'S RAGE
anything at all about it! I can see what you're getting at!
You think I made up Ore being made into a half-snake thing
because I'd dreamed about the man-serpent!"
"I am not trying to invalidate your experiences. I am
merely suggesting certain parallels. The interpretations will
be yours. However, allow me to point out that you deny
feeling anything about it. Yet you responded with more than
a little anger. For the present, we'll not go into that. You
think about it, then tell me your conclusions."
Jim leaned forward, his hands holding tight to the arms of
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
the chair. His heart was beating even harder than it had a
moment ago, and he was sweating more heavily. What he felt
was, he felt as if he'd like to get out of the office. Right now.
"Look, Doc!" he said harshly. But even he could hear an
underlying note of pleading. "Where I went and what I saw
and did, I mean, what Ore did, was no fantasy! It was all
true, and I don't care what parallels there are to my life here
on Earth and there in the Lords' universes! Hell, I could
find parallels between my life and a thousand others on
Earth! There is such a thing as coincidence, you know! No
matter how crazily I might fantasize, I can do things, know
things, no fantasies could teach me! Like speaking Thoan,
for instance! You want to hear fluent Thoan?
"Samon-ke fath? Meaning, Where do I go from here?
Orc-tam Ore man-kirn. Yem tath Orc-tha. Meaning, Ore
was once just called Ore. Now, he's called Red Ore. If you
want me to, I'll rattle off a long story in Thoan. And I'll
give you the grammar, too!
"And where would I learn how to work flint into knives,
arrowheads, spearpoints, scrapers, chisels, you name it?
Bring me a core of raw flint, I'll shape from it any tool
anybody can make from flint! How could I know how to do
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
that unless I'd really been in Ore's mind and had seen him
260
and Ijim work flint and then brought back how to do it
stored in my memory?
"Then there's the whiplashes I brought back from the time
Ore got whipped by the slave driver! Yeah, I know I've had
stigmata, and maybe that's just psychosomatic stuff! But that
time, I just didn't bleed from my back! The cuts made by the
whip were there, too! They hurt like hell, they were real!
"Then there's the controlled wet dreams I learned from
Ore! You're starting to control the dreams and delusions of
the patients, but they can't hold a candle to my controlled
dreams for control or realism! How'd I leam to do that? On
my own? No way! I learned it from Ore!
"I could go on, but you got more than enough to make
you wonder if maybe I'm not telling the truth, haven't you?
And I suppose you think just because Ore cut off his father's
balls I'd like to cut off my father's?"
Doctor Porsena said, "Would you?"
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"Yeah, there're times when I'd've been glad to! But I
swear, mad as I've been at him, I never once thought about
doing that. Maybe stringing him up by them. But cutting
them off and eating them raw, for God's sake never! So
how come, if I'm just imagining Ore and what he does, did
he do something I'd never thought of?"
"You tell me."
"Oh, sure, it was my unconscious mind did it!"
"And . . . ?"
"And? What else? Oh, well, there's my imagination. It's
a free-wheeling extrapolator, according to Mister Lum.
Takes a basic premise or fact or idea and builds logically
from that. Maybe you could be right about that. But not
about the other stuff. Not my speaking Thoan and working
flint and, I didn't mention this before, my knowledge of
biology and chemistry I couldn't have learned unless I'd
tapped into Ore's mind. That can't be explained."
267
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
PHILIP JOSE FARMER
Jim tried to lean back and relax.
"Listen, Doctor! We can settle this! You can put me on
the lie detector machine, question me all you want, and then
you'll see I'm not lying!"
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]