could make you listen. There was no penalty if you did not listen except the penalty of having gone against your destiny.
There were other thoughts or other voices. Sutton could not tell which they were, but they were outside the tangled thing that was he and destiny.
That is my body, he thought. And I am somewhere else. Someplace where there is no seeing as I used to see…and no hearing, although I see and hear, but with another's senses and in an alien way.
The screen let him through, said one thought, although screen was not the word it used.
And another said, The screen has served its purpose.
And another said that there was a certain technique he had picked up on a planet, the name of which blurred and ran and made a splotch and had no meaning at all so far as Sutton could make out.
Still another pointed out the singular complexity and inefficiency of Sutton's mangled body and spoke enthusiastically of the simplicity and perfection of direct energy intake.
Sutton tried to cry out to them for the love of God to hurry, for his body was a fragile thing, that if they waited too long it would be past all mending. But he could not say it and as if in a dream he listened to the interplay of thought, the flash and flicker of individual opinion, all molding into one cohesive thought that spelled eventual decision.
He tried to wonder where he was, tried to orient himself, and found that he could not even define himself. For himself no longer was a body or a place in space or time, nor even a personal pronoun. It was a hanging, dangling thing that had no substance and no fixture in the scheme of time and it could not recognize itself no matter what it did. It was a vacuum that knew it existed and it was dominated by something else that might as well have been a vacuum for all the recognition he could make of it.
He was outside his body and he lived. But where or how there was no way of knowing.
I am your destiny, the answerer that seemed a part of him had said.
But destiny was a word and nothing more. An idea. An abstraction. A tenuous definition for something that the mind of Man had conceived, but could not prove…that the mind of Man was willing to agree was an idea only and could not be proved.
You are wrong, said Sutton's destiny. Destiny is real although you cannot see it. It is real for you and for all other things…for every single thing that knows the surge of life. And it has always been and it will always be.
This is not death? asked Sutton.
You are the first to come to us, said destiny. We cannot let you die. We will give you back your body, but until then you will live with me. You will be part of me. And that is only fair, for I have lived with you; I have been part of you.
You did not want me here, said Sutton. You built a screen to keep me out.
We wanted one, said destiny. One only. You are that one; there will be no more.
But the screen?
It was keyed to a mind, said destiny. To a certain mind. The kind of mind we wanted.
But you let me die.
You had to die, destiny told him. Until you died and became one of us you could not know. In your body we could not have reached you. You had to die so that you would be freed and I was there to take you and make you part of me so you would understand.
I do not understand, said Sutton.
You will, said destiny. You will.
And I did, thought Sutton, remembering. I did.
His body shook as he remembered and his mind stood awed with the vast, unsuspected immensity of destiny…of trillions upon trillions of destinies to match the teeming life of the galaxy.
Destiny had stirred a million years before and a shaggy ape thing had stooped and picked up a broken stick. It stirred again and struck flint together. It stirred once more and there was a bow and arrow. Again, and the wheel was born.
Destiny whispered and a thing climbed dripping from the water and in the years to come its fins were legs and its gills were nostrils.
Symbiotic abstractions. Parasites. Call them what you would. They were destiny.
And the time had come for the galaxy to know of destiny.
If parasites, then beneficial parasites, ready to give more than they could take. For all they got was the sense of living, the sense of being…and what they gave, or stood ready to give, was far more than mere living.
For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated unintelligence that crept through nauseous jungle worlds.
But because of them someday an angleworm might be more than an angleworm…or a greater angleworm. The bloated unintelligence might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man.
For every thing that moved, whether slow or fast, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.
And sometimes destiny took a hold and caught…and sometimes it didn't. But where there was destiny there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.
Nor crawls nor hops nor swims nor flies nor shambles.
One planet barred to every mind but one and, once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.
One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.
That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.
Lord help me now.
For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been I, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.
It is too much to ask, he thought…too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man's, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.
But destiny put the finger on me.
Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck…it would be destiny.
I lived with destiny, as destiny…I was a part of destiny instead of destiny being a part of me, and we came to know each other as if we were two humans…better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.
I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand…the part of me I still do not understand…until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body and a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and the flimsy structure of the human body.
And when they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before…many things, I suspect, I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I'll never know about.
When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again, but now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together and I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.
Symbiosis, Sutton told himself, a higher symbiosis than the symbiosis of heather with its fungus or the primitive animal with its alga. A mental symbiosis. I am the host and Johnny is my guest and we get along together because we understand each other. Johnny gives me an awareness of my destiny, of the operative force of destiny that shapes my hours and days, and I give Johnny the semblance of life that he could not have through his existence independently.
'Johnny,' he called and there was no answer.
He waited and there was no answer.
'Johnny,' he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.
Unless…unless…the thought struck him slowly, kindly. Unless he were really dead. Unless this were
