Illusions (6 page)

  
         
His handbook fell out of the pocket as I took off my shirt, and I read it where it opened.

  
 
The bond

     
that links your true family

    
  
is not one of blood, but

      
of respect and joy in

           
each other's life.

              
Rarely do members

               
of one family grow

                 
under the same

                 
roof.

  
         
I didn't see how that applied to me and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under the blanket, and then I was out like a bulb turned off warm and dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure.

  
         
When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because something was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted wildly and nearly broke my hand... a nine-sixteenths end-wrench is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as eager to get at all those pesky nuts an bolts.

  
         
"Well, hell!"

  
         
I never say hell or damn-carryover from an ego thing as a child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. What was happening to my wrench: Donald Shimoda was sixty miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, examine it, balance it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be some simple reason . . .

  
         
I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag an lit the fire for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay here all day, if I felt like it.

  
         
The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be turned when I hear a sound in the sky to the west.

  
         
There was no way that the sound could have been Shimoda's airplane, no way anybody could have tracked me to this one field out of millions of midwest fields, but I knew that it was him an started whistling. . . watching the bread and the sky an trying to think of something very calm to say when he lane.

  
         
It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pulled up steep in a show-off turn, slipped own through the air an lane 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled alongside an shut own his engine. I didn't say anything. Waved, but didn't say a word. I did stop whistling.

  
         
He got out of the cockpit an walked to the fire. "Hi, Richard."

  
         
"You're late," I said. "Almost burned the pan-bread."

  
         
"Sorry-"

  
         
I handed him a cup of stream water
 
and a tin plate with half the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine.

  
         
"How'd it go ?" I said.

  
         
"Went OK," he said with an instant's half-smile. "I escaped with my life."

  
         
"Had some doubts you would."

  
         
He ate the bread for a while in silence. "You know," he said at last, contemplating his meal, "this is really terrible stuff."

  
         
"Nobody says you have to eat my panbread," I said crossly. "Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?"

 
          
 
"Well," he grinned, "-and I'm speaking as God, now-I'd say that you believe that it's good and that therefore it does taste good to you. Try it without deeply believing what you believe and it's sort of like . . . a fire . . . after a flood . . . in a flour mill, don't you think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess."

  
         
"Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don't you think the basic bread itself --not the grass or the little charred part, there-the basic pan-bread, don't you think . . . ?"

  
         
"Terrible," he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had handed to him. "I'd rather starve. Still have the peaches?"

  
         
"In the box."

  
         
How had he found me, in this field? A twenty-eight-foot wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he would tell me.

  
         
"How did you find me?" I said. "I could have landed anywhere."

  
         
He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a knife . . . not an easy trick.

  
         
"Like attracts like," he muttered, missing a peach slice.
  

  
         
"Oh-"

  
         
"Cosmic law. "

  
         
"Oh "

  
         
I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from the stream. That sure is good bread.

  
         
"Do you mind explaining? How is it that I am like your esteemed self? Or did by 'like' you mean the airplanes are alike, sort of?"

  
         
"We miracle-workers got to stick together," he said. The sentence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it.

  
         
"Ah . . . Don: Referring to your last comment? Perhaps you'd like to tell me what you had in mind: we miracle workers?"

  
         
"From the position of the nine-sixteenths on the toolbag, I'd say you were running the old levitate-the-end-wrench trick this morning. Tell me if I'm wrong."

  
         
"Wasn't running anything! I woke up . . . the thing woke me up, by itself!"

  
         
"Oh. By itself." He was laughing at me.

  
         
"YES BY ITSELF!"

  
         
"Your understanding of your miracle working, Richard, is as thorough as your understanding of bread-baking."

 
          
 
I didn't reply to that, just eased myself down on my bedroll and was quiet as could be If he had something to say, he could say it in his own good time.

 
          
 
"Some of us start learning these things subconsciously. Our waking mind won't accept it, so we do our miracles in our sleep." He watched the sky, and the first clouds of the day. "Don't be impatient, Richard. We're all on our way to learning more. It will come to you a little faster now, and you'll be a wise old spiritual maestro before you know it."

  
         
"What do you mean, before I know it? I don't want to know it! I don't want to know anything!"

  
         
"You don't want to know anything."

  
         
"Well, I want to know why the world is and what it is and why I live here and where I'm going next . . . I want to know that. How to fly without an airplane, if I had a wish."

  
         
"Sorry."

  
         
"Sorry what:"

  
         
"Doesn't work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore." He looked away from the sky. "You're like everybody else. You already know this stuff, you're just not aware that you know it, yet."

  
         
"I don't recall," I said, "I don't recall your asking me whether I want to learn this thing, whatever it is that has brought you crowds and misery all your life. Seems to have slipped my mind." Soon as I said the words I knew that he was going to say I'd remember later, and that he'd be right.

  
         
He stretched out in the grass, the last of the flour in its bag for a pillow. "Look, you don't worry about the crowds. They can't touch you unless you want them to. You're magic, remember: FOOF!-you're invisible, and walk through the doors."

 
          
 
"Crowd got you at
Troy
, didn't it?"

  
         
"Did I say I didn't want them to? I allowed that. I liked it. There's a little ham in all of us or we'd never make it as masters."

  
         
"But didn't you quit? Didn't I read... ?"

  
         
"The way things were going, I was turning into the One-and-Only Full-Time Messiah, and that job I quit cold. But I can't unlearn what I've spent lifetimes coming to know, can I?"

 
          
 
I closed my eyes and crunched a hay stem. "look, Donald, what are you trying to tell me? Why don't you come right out and say what is going on?"

  
         
It was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "Maybe you ought to tell me. You tell me what I'm trying to say, and I'll correct you if you're wrong. "

  
         
I thought about that a minute, and decided to surprise him. "OK, I'll tell you." I practiced then pausing, to see how long he could wait if what I said didn't come out too fluent. The sun was high enough now to be warm, and way off in some hidden field a farmer worked a diesel tractor, cultivating corn on Sunday.

  
         
"OK, I'll tell you. First of all, it was no coincidence when I first saw you landed down in the field at Ferris, right?"

 
          
 
He was quiet as the hay growing.

  
         
"And second of all, you and I have some kind of mystical agreement which apparently I have forgotten and you haven't."

  
         
Only a soft wind blowing, and the distant tractor-sound wafting back and forth with it.

  
         
There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story.

  
         
"I'm going to say that we met three or four thousand years ago, give or take a day. We like the same kind of adventures, we probably hate the same sort of destroyers, learn with about as much fun, about as fast as each other. You've got a better memory. Our meeting again is what you mean by 'Like attracts like,' that you said."

  
         
I picked a new hay-stem. "How am I doing ?"

  
         
"For a while I thought it was going to be a long haul," he said. "It is going to be a long haul, but I think there's a slim out side chance that you might make it this time. Keep talking."

  
         
"For another thing, I don't have to keep talking, because you already know what things people know. But if I didn't say these things, you wouldn't know what I think that I know, and without that I can't learn any of the things I want to learn." I put down my hay-stem. "What's in it for you, Don? Why do you bother with people like me ? Whenever some body is advanced as you are, he gets all these miracle-powers as byproducts. You don't need me, you don't need anything at all from this world."

  
         
I turned my head and looked at him. His eyes were closed. "Like gas in the Travel Air?" he said.