“Why not?” That was indeed what Conrad had been thinking of; Yanderman’s offhand dismissal of the chance was a blow.
“Hmmm … You’re asking a difficult question for this time of the night, boy! I’m not sure I understand it fully myself, but I’ll do my best. You’ve got at your visions during most of your life by sitting and relaxing and then letting your attention settle on nothing in particular, right? A patch of sunlight on the ground, maybe, or a white pebble, or the tip of your forefinger-anything like that.”
“Did I tell you that?”
“No.” Yanderman chuckled. “I didn’t even have to ask you. Am I right?”
Conrad shivered. “Y-yes. Absolutely right. Is that the way everyone manages it?”
“Most people do. It’s autohypnosis. Instead of a crystal ball on a chain, I could use my fingertip to make you go into trance. The-No, I’m wandering from the point. I was going to say that when you return from self-induced trance you have difficulty capturing the memories of your visions because so many of the things in them don’t connect with ordinary life, right? If you tried to recount them afterwards, you probably had to leave out a great deal because you couldn’t make sense of it.”
“That’s so,” Conrad confirmed.
“Which probably suggested that you’d had a mere dream. In dreams, logic doesn’t operate, and they’re just as hard to explain afterwards. Now imagine me questioning you during trance. I can’t see or hear what you’re experiencing. I have to put broad general questions, and you describe what you can. But what you’re seeing may not refer to anything you or I ever saw in waking life. For all I know, indeed, you may have had a vision already in which you saw this Station when it was in full operation-Granny Jassy might have had one, or anybody! But because it connected with what I’ve always until now believed to be sheer superstition, the tale of walking to other worlds, I’d have avoided putting the right questions to you. Can you follow me, or am I so tired I’m muddling you?”
“I think I’m following all right. But this reminds me of what I meant to say at the beginning. This girl Nestamay-”
“Who is very interested in you, I notice.”
“If she hadn’t anyone else to choose except the one who got himself killed it’s hardly surprising!” Conrad snapped. “Let me finish!”
“I’m sorry,” Yanderman murmured.
“I’ve seen her in a vision. I tried to tell you earlier, but you said it was a family resemblance. It isn’t! The more I think about it, the more I’m sure. And I tell you something else I’ve remembered.” Conrad half-sat up and turned on one elbow, staring fiercely into the darkness.
“It must be ten years or more since I bothered with a vision of the barrenland for any length of time. Did I tell you I had visions of the barrenland as well as of the area before it was barren?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. Go on.” Yanderman sounded interested.
Conrad took a deep breath. “Well, I’d almost forgotten that I didn’t always prefer to concentrate on the visions of the distant past. I suppose it must have been after I got interested in girls that I settled for that. There are always lots of people in the-uh-the pre-barrenland visions.
“But I did sometimes have visions of the barrenland just being the way it is, with a few people in it here and there. I think I might have got caught up with these after Nestamay’s father came to Lagwich and was taken for a devil. I’d had all the kid’s grandiose dreams of becoming a famous thing-killer like Waygan the hornman, the father of the present one. It was probably with the idea of killing devils instead of things that I thought about the barrenland at all. I kept at it on and off for a year or two, and then lost interest.
“It wasn’t till I realised Nestamay reminded me of something that the memory came back. I didn’t recognise her at once for two reasons, I guess: first, I was trying to recall a person, and in fact it was my soap-carving I was thinking of, and second, she’s changed.”
“Family resemblance is still more likely.”
“No! She’s changed. As though-oh, like growing up. In fact, that’s precisely it! My soap-carving looked like Nestamay as she would have been when she was a little girl, in spite of my trying to make it look like Idris nowadays. What’s more-” He checked with a strangled sound, and then resumed in a near-shout of frantic excitement.
“I’ve got it! That was why I stopped bothering about visions of the barrenland! It was because in them I saw ordinary people instead of the fearsome devils I was after, to kill! I didn’t care about little girls and folk who looked like just anybody!”
He dropped his voice again to an awe-hushed whisper, and finished, “Yanderman, I feel I’m beginning to remember all sorts of crazy things!”
“A sensation that you’ve been here before? That you’ve seen this place already?”
“Exactly!” Conrad was almost bouncing with excitement.
“It’s an illusion,” Yanderman said, the words almost stifled by a healthy yawn. “It’s very common. It generally passes off in an hour or two at longest.”
“But-!”
“Conrad, life begins here very early in the morning,” Yanderman interrupted. “I think we ought to go to sleep, or when they show us over the Station in the morning we won’t understand anything we see.”
“It’s not an illusion,” muttered Conrad obstinately. But Yanderman didn’t answer, except by rolling over noisily on his make-shift bed and yawning again even louder.
XXII
Twelve hours later Conrad sat moodily in the hot sun, a piece of unsalvaged scrap of indeterminate purpose serving as a stool, and tossed pebbles from hand to hand.
It wasn’t that he had meant to be rude to Nestamay, he explained furiously to himself. It was just-
Well, over there, for example: Yanderman talking intently to Maxall, being fluent and knowledgeable about things of which he had no direct experience, making a tremendous impression on the old man as he had already done on Keefe, Egrin and all the others. It wasn’t fair. The clues and hints he was drawing on were taken from him, Conrad, the one with the gift of seeing into the past-and Conrad himself couldn’t make use of them.
Yanderman’s explanation of why not was very convincing. It was perfectly true that his visions had always had a dreamlike quality which rendered them difficult to recapture. But being right on that score didn’t make him right on everything!
With a rebellious expression Conrad flung his pebbles into a patch of dust.
Why should his feeling of having seen all this before be a mere illusion? Yanderman was willing enough to accept that his visions of the barrenland before it was barren corresponded to a past reality; wasn’t there room in a span of four and a half centuries for a whole lot of true visions? The more he thought about it, the more Conrad came to the conclusion that he really had visualised parts of this area around the so-called Station in the brief period following the arrival of the “devil”-Nestamay’s father-at Lagwich. He hadn’t been interested in things like that for long. Other visions, those in which he dreamed of a prosperous and fertile landscape populated by marvellous people with astonishing powers, offered a more attractive contrast to the boredom and depression of reality.
The haunting, disquieting sensation of almost remembering had come and gone during the whole of this morning. Every now and again it had become acute-when Maxall was showing them the device which maintained their clothing, for example, and again when he showed off the solar power accumulators and the heatbeams which had drained them yesterday.