Vertigo

Morlacher.

His relationship with Theo Werry became equally stagnant and unproductive, although in that case Hasson knew exactly what was wrong. The boy had all of the young male’s natural respect for strength and courage, a respect which perhaps was enhanced by his handicap, and it was easy to guess the opinion he had formed of Hasson. In addition, the generation gap had been yawning between them ever since Hasson had put forward his views about angels in general, and their shared interests in music and literature were unable to bridge it.

Hasson chose to bide his time with Theo, watching closely for the first sign of encouragement, but the boy remained aloof, spending much of his free time in his bedroom. On a number of occasions as Hasson was going along the darkened landing he saw the door to Theo’s room being limned with brief flashes of light, but he passed on his way each time, forcing himself to ignore the distress beacon, knowing that any attempt to answer it would be regarded as an intrusion. Once, well after midnight, he thought he heard a voice in the room and hesitated at the door, wondering if Theo could be having a nightmare. The sound died away almost immediately and Hasson passed on his way back to his television set, saddened by the idea that even the spurious vision of bad dreams could be cherished by a blind person.

As the new pattern of his life became a routine Hasson welcomed the dulling of his perceptions. Monotony was a mind-sapping drug to which he quickly became addicted and he drew comfort from a rapidly growing conviction that nothing of any significance would ever happen to him again, that night and day would continue to merge into the undemanding and featureless grey blur of eternity.

He was, therefore, taken by surprise by two miracles which occurred within a few days of each other.

The first miracle was external to Hasson and concerned the weather. For perhaps a week he was dimly aware of great changes taking place out of doors, of the light softening and the air growing warmer, of the sounds of trickling water replacing the night-time stillness. On the television there were reports of floods from other parts of the country, and once when Hasson looked out of his window he saw adults and children engaged in a British-style snowball fight in a nearby garden — an indication that the nature of the snow itself had changed. It had ceased being a light dry powder and now could be moulded into solidity, a mock-solidity which heralded its oncoming dissolution.

And then Hasson got up one morning to find that the long Albertan summer had begun.

Conditioned as he was to the protracted and uncertain seasons of the Western European seaboard, to the reluctant, ragged retreat of winter and the equally hesitant advance of milder weather, Hasson was scarcely able to comprehend what had happened. He was standing at his window looking out at a transformed world whose dominant colours were greens and yellows when he became aware of the fact that a second miracle had taken place.

There was no pain.

He had wakened and had risen from his bed without pain, accepting the condition as instinctively and unthinkingly as a creature of the wild stirring itself in response to the light of dawn. Hasson turned away from the window and looked down at himself, feeling the morning sunlight warm on his back, and made a few tentative movements like a gymnast limbering up for a display. There was no pain. He crossed to the bed, lay on it and got up again, proving to himself that he was a whole man. There was no pain. He touched his toes, then rotated his trunk so that he could touch the back of each heel with the opposite hand. There was no pain.

Hasson looked all around the bedroom, breathing deeply, the sudden possessor of untold riches, and made further discoveries. The room seemed more homely — its framed photographs nothing more than signs of family occupancy — but it had also grown too small. It was a suitable place for sleeping in at night, but there was a huge country outside, unexplored and intriguing, full of new places to visit, new sights to see, people to meet, food and drink to enjoy, fresh air to breathe…

With a rush of pleasure and gratitude, Hasson found he could contemplate the future without flinching, with no welling up of the darkness of the soul. He could anticipate reading, listening to music, swimming, attending parties, meeting girls, going to the theatre, perhaps even strapping on a CG harness and…

No !

The icy prickling on his forehead made Hasson realise he had gone too far. For a moment he had allowed himself to remember fully what it was like to stand on an invisible peak of nothingness, to look down at his booted feet and see them outlined clear and sharp against a background of fuzzy pastel geometries, to alter the focus of the eyes and translate that background into a dizzy, detailed spread of city blocks and squares many kilometres below, with rivers like twists of lead stapled by bridges, and ground cars shrunk to specks and halted by distance on white threads of concrete. He shook his head, dismissing the vision, and began to make plans whose scope did not extend beyond his own mortal capabilities.

Several days went by in which he was content to consolidate his new position, days in which he held himself ready to experience a mental and physical relapse. The bedroom which had once been a haven of security was mildly claustrophobic now. He reduced his time at the television set to an hour or two before going to bed, and instead began taking walks which were brief at first but which soon lasted three or more hours.

One of his first expeditions was to the health food store, where Oliver Fan gave him a single appraising glance and, without allowing him time to speak, said, “Good! Now that you’ve discovered some of the benefits of proper diet I can begin to make some real money out of you.”

“Hold on,” Hasson replied, feeling an ingenuous pleasure over the fact that his state of well-being was noticeable. “I admit I’m feeling better, but what makes you so sure your stuff had anything to do with it? How do I know I wasn’t naturally on the point of picking up a little?”

“Do you believe that?”

“All I’m saying is that there must be a natural tendency to…

“To get over illness and injury? There is. Homeostasis is the word for what you’re talking about, Mr Haldane. It’s a powerful force, but we can assist it or hold it back — as in the case of those painful little moon craters in your mouth that you had for months and haven’t got any more.” Oliver shrugged expressively. “But if you feel you haven’t had value for money…”

“I didn’t mean that,” Hasson said, reaching into his pocket.

Oliver grinned. “I know you didn’t — you were just showing that you’re no longer afraid of me.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes. The day you first walked in here you were afraid of everybody in the world, including me. Please try to remember that, Mr Haldane, because when you’re making a journey it’s very important to know where you started from.”

“I remember it.” Hasson stared at the little Asian for a moment, then an impulse extended his hand. Oliver shook hands with him in silence.

Hasson remained in the store for more than an hour, waiting in the background while other customers were being served, fascinated by Oliver’s discourses on alternative medicine. At the end of the time he was still not entirely certain about Oliver’s credentials and his fund of anecdotal case histories, but he was carrying a bag filled with new additions to his daily diet, the chief of which were live yoghurt and wheat germ. He also took with him the conviction that he had made a genuine friend, and in the days that followed he began calling regularly at the store, often just for the conversation. In spite of his professed commercialism, Oliver seemed happy enough with that arrangement and Hasson began to suspect that he himself was providing material for yet another dietetic dossier. He had no objections to that, and in fact had to fight off a fulfilling-of-the-prophecy syndrome which tempted him to give Oliver exaggerated reports of his progress.

The progress itself, however, was genuine and exhilarating. There were occasional psychological fiat spots, reminders that elation was not a normal state of mind, but — as Dr Colebrook had predicted for him — Hasson found he could handle them with increasing confidence and skill. He extended his programme of exercise to cover walks which lasted six or eight hours and took him many kilometres into the hilly terrain which lay to the north and west of the city. On those days he carried food he had prepared for himself, and during the lunch breaks would read and re-read an early copy of Leacock’s Literary Lapses that he found in a store in Tripletree.

He had bought the book with the intention of being prepared for a reconciliation with Theo, but the boy had kept up his barriers of reserve and Hasson had been too intent on his own affairs to try pressing the matter. In the process of recovery he became almost as obsessive and self-centred as he had been during the illness, pursuing fitness with a miserly lust, and in that state of mind the problems of others receded into unimportance. He knew for example, that the return of warm weather had made the fantastic eyrie of the Chinook Hotel a much more habitable place at night, and that there had been a corresponding increase in the activities of the young fliers who used it as a headquarters. He was aware of AL Werry fretting about empathin parties in the tower, and the growing frequency of offences which air police jargon reduced to convenient sets of initials (AC, aerial collision: TDO, transportation of dense objects: AD, aerial defecation) — but which represented a genuine social menace — and none of it had any significance for him. He was isolated from the rest of humanity — just as surely as when hovering on the high threshold of space — fighting a private war, and had no reserves for anything else.

The closest he came to involvement was one morning when climbing a high saddle back to the west of the city, trying for a view of the Lesser Slave and Utikuma Lakes. A huge silence lay over the land, undisturbed by insects in that early part of the summer. There was no visible trace of human existence and it was possible to imagine that time moved at a slower pace here, that the last of the Pleistocene glaciers had barely retreated and the first of the Mongoliform tribes had yet to pick their way across the Bering Strait from the west.

Hasson had paused in his ascent and was trying to adjust his vision to accommodate the vast sloping perspectives when, without any warning, a brilliant source of light sprang into being in the sky to the north. The grass all around him glittered like tiny scimitars as if he had been caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight mounted on a helicopter, but the silence remained unbroken. Hasson shielded his eyes and tried to focus on the object, but it appeared as an anonymous centre of brilliance surrounded by a rosette of oily needles of light. The sky pulsed in blue circles.

As he watched, a second eye-searing point appeared close to the first, and that was followed by others until there was a ring of six miniature suns blazing down on Hasson, pinning him at the apex of a cone blinding radiance. The grass at his feet incandesced as though about to explode into flame.

Hasson experienced a moment of near-superstitious dread before ingrained mental disciplines came to his rescue. Mirrors, he thought. A group of six fliers. Height anywhere from five hundred to a thousand metres — enough to render them invisible against a bright sky. Violations: TDO, for a start. Possible intended violations: Anything they feel like — there’s nothing here to stop them.

He lowered his gaze and resumed the climb, straining his ears for anything — a rush of air or the sound of voices — which might indicate that he was going to be caught up in something more serious than a juvenile game. The light continued to flicker around his path for a minute, then abruptly vanished. Hasson went on climbing for another minute before stopping and scanning the hemisphere of the sky. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen, but he no longer felt alone or remote from the 21st Century. The sky was a sentient blue lens.

A short time later, while he was seated on a rock having lunch, he was struck by a comforting thought which almost made him feel grateful to the group of unseen fliers. During the incident he had felt worried, tense, apprehensive — but not afraid. Not excessively so, anyway. There had been a certain coolness of the forehead and hollowness of the stomach, but none of the plethora of devastating symptoms he had come to know so well in recent months. There was a possibility that he was further along the road to recovery than he had realized.

He mused over the notion for a time, taking it to its logical conclusion, then rose to his feet and began walking in the direction of Tripletree. “Sure thing Borrow any harness you want — we’ve got lots of them just lying around the place.” Werry gave Hasson an encouraging smile, “Do you want to use my spare suit?”

“No need — I won’t be going up far.” Hasson smiled in return, trying not to appear too diffident. “I’m just going to fool around for a while, really. See about getting acclimatised. You know how it is…”

“Can’t say I do. I thought you were acrophobic.”

“What made you think that?”

Werry shrugged. “Just an impression. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it? Lots of people can’t fly after a smash.”

“That’s true, but it doesn’t apply in my case,” Hasson said, wondering why he felt the need to lie.

“Well, do you want me to go up with you just to be sure?” Werry put aside the cloth he had been using to polish his boots and stood up, his uniform making him seem like an invader in the domesticity of his own kitchen, On returning from his walk Hasson had found him alone in the house and had decided to waste no time in setting up his private experiment.

“I can manage by myself,” Hasson said, unable to keep the edge from his voice.

“Okay, Rob.” Werry looked at him with a rueful expression. “I can’t tell where helpfulness ends and nosiness begins. Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’d feel self-conscious if…”

“This is what I was telling you about, Rob. This morning at the station Henry Corzyn — that’s one of my patrolmen, the fat one — started griping about being short of money this month, and