1999: Things Man was Meant to Know

Part II: A Walk in the Park


   He hadn't enjoyed lying to them, particularly after they'd both put up with his interference. If he'd been anyone else, Joel would probably have laid him out with a single punch, and he'd clearly heard the hidden anger in Lyta's voice as she'd needled him about his love life. Kent knew that it would be in everyone's best interests -- especially his own -- if he got out of the way and let them settle matters privately. So, transposing his meeting with his UNCLE counterpart yesterday to the present, he'd headed out into the early evening.

   And as he rode the train back into Manhattan, he began to regret it. It was a selfish impulse, but he didn't care to be at loose ends like this, without any way to make use of time either constructively or destructively. It had been so long since he tasted freedom from responsibility that it was like ashes in his mouth.

   He could alert the police that he intended to go on patrol, but that would entail an enormous amount of paperwork, increasing exponentially if he interfered with any ongoing investigations. More to the point, it would mean dealing with Harry Drescher, the NYPD liaison with UNSTA, something he sought to avoid whenever possible. The scars from the first time the two of them had met, ten years before, still hadn't faded.

   A woman they'd both loved -- Kent had known her as Theresa Smith, Drescher as Susan Pollard -- had died, begging Kent to save her son from his nemesis, the Jester. He'd done so, with Drescher's help, only to discover that "Theresa" had tricked him. Either intentionally or otherwise, she'd allowed him to believe that the baby was his son, when in fact Drescher was the father. The possibility that Theresa had thought he wouldn't rescue the child if he didn't think it to be his own flesh and blood had hurt him as much as losing her.

   He could always head back to UNSTA's New York headquarters and get an early night's sleep, but in his current mood he'd probably just end up pacing the halls and annoying the technicians who let him think he ran the place. Or have another argument with one of his colleagues. There'd been too many of those lately.

   Abruptly, Kent realized that the next stop of the train would bring him to the southern edge of Central Park, and decided to get off. It was still early enough that the park would be open, but late enough that sensible people knew not to go in alone.

   He didn't consider the implications of that thought until after he passed through the gates, and they made him sigh in self-reproach. Once again, he was deliberately seeking out a dangerous situation in order to throw himself into the middle of it, with no end in mind except a wish to experience a rush of adrenaline.

   Kent knew that it wasn't completely his fault. Quite apart from any implausible theories about a desire for adventure "in his blood", his early conditioning held most of the blame. He hadn't been trained as intensely as his father was before him -- he'd been four years old when it started, instead of less than two -- and there hadn't been a specific goal for which he'd been trained. His father didn't want to turn Kent into a weapon against the forces of evil; he just hadn't known any other way to raise a son.

   So that son had grown to enjoy the training for its own sake, for the joy to testing his abilities to their utmost. And he'd learned that any training paled in comparison to the experience gained from an uncontrolled environment. His first month as a med-evac helicopter pilot in Vietnam had taught him that. But he thrived in the chaos.

   It was unfortunate. Nearly all the teachers of the many forms from which he'd built his own bastard fighting style had told him that he wasted his potential, focusing on the martial rather than the art. Only one had understood his aims, and even Lee had felt that Kent's tendency towards agression was a dangerous flaw.

   There were better, less potentially fatal ways of expreiencing every moment to its fullest. Kent reflected on this as he watched the peaceful ripples on the lake. That he couldn't fully appreciate the serenity of the moment was a flaw in him. Instead, his mind churned incessantly with thoughts of conflict.

   First in his thoughts, as was so often the case lately, was his on-going struggle with Patricia DelaFontaine. Lyta had been shrewdly accurate in her assessment of the younger woman's feelings for him, and in the privacy of his mind he could admit that he also felt an attraction. Their respective ages were as much a barrier to that feeling as the fact that she bore his mother's name -- in other words, none at all.

   In the four years since she'd joined the UNSTA field team, he'd watched her pass through fields of destruction and baptisms of fire, and witnessed her suffering. In all that fear and alarm, she hadn't made a single serious, mission-destroying error, which was more than could be said for many men twice her chronological age. In maturity, she was nearly his equal.

   And to dispel the Oedipal assocations of her name, she was nothing like his mother. Bright auburn hair contrasted with the gold and later platinum of his memories. The younger Patricia was short while his mother had been tall, slender to her full figure, quiet to her boisterousness. The only things they shared were considerable courage and a formidable temper.

   There was no reason that Kent shouldn't be honored by her interest in him, nor any reason that he should refuse to return it. No reason but one.

   He could not understand what she could possibly find so attractive about him.

   Kent reached down, picked up a likely stone, and threw it at a perfect angle. It skipped several times before dropping beneath the surface with a loud pop. For a few moments, one could watch the ripples on the pond, before they dissolved into the general flow.

   So it was with his life.

   For twenty-two years he had watched the world grow sadder, darker and above al else stranger. No, not watched. He'd tried to prevent the sadness, hold back the darkness and understand the strangeness. The line of his life had disrupted the plans of many bad men and women -- but there were always more waiting in the wings. And as for the strangeness ...

   Perhaps the stars were becoming "right". Perhaps that author -- Bauer, Kent recalled -- had not only been correct but conservative about the number of mutants born as a result of a meteoric incident two centuries before. Perhaps the so-called fringe sciences had advanced as far as the conventional sciences over the last century of progress. Perhaps a thousand perhapses ... in twenty-two years, he'd never come close to understanding the source of the growing strangeness.

   And with a sudden jolt of inspiration, Kent realized that he *did* understand. All the pieces had been there, he just hadn't looked at them in the right way until this very moment.

   Applied quantum physics suggested that the universe was not only influenced, but in fact created by the perceptions of sentient beings. There *were* many more mutants than anyone thought, and countless other strange beings, not only from this world but from many others. Reports about them came into UNSTA offices every day. There was always something magic, always something new.

   What that added up to, then, was thousands, perhaps millions of beings whose internal realities -- their self-images -- could not and did not mesh with the external realities that their more mundane brethren projected. Instead, they were strange, and more importantly self-consciously strange. So their perceptions were colored by strangeness, and the reality created by those perceptions became stranger ... which gave rise to more strange beings, beginning the cycle all over again.

   The stranger it is, the stranger it's going to get, Kent thought, codifying Masefield's Law.

   And then the corollaries occurred to him, replacing the brief surge of pleasure with even greater depression. If it were so, then all his efforts over the last twenty-two years had only been splashes on the pond of reality. For the sake of which, he had sacrificed not only his own future, but that of everyone else he'd drawn into a never-ending battle.

   He had become his father. And the words from the Rubayyat that Clark Savage Jr. had been reading on the day before he left on his final mission, the day before his only son's tenth birthday, echoed through Kent's mind.

   Up from Earth's Center through the Seventh Gate
   I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate
        And many a knot unravell'd by the Road;
   But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.

   He wanted to scream.

   He wanted to sob.

   But before he could do either, he heard. And what he heard was so strange that he listened.

   Hoofsteps. In and of themselves, they were not unusual. Kent recalled that there were several horse-drawn carriages in operation in and around the park, in addition to New York's mounted police. But if they came from a carriage, why were there only a single set, instead of two or more? And in any event, why wasn't there the faintest sound of metal in the sound, as though the sound-maker was unshorn.

   For another moment, the hoofsteps moved at a cantor towards him, and then stopped. They did not slow; they came to a complete stop, and he could not hear the sound of a horse breathing behind him.

   Slowly, he turned, and looked, and saw.

   After a while, he found his voice. "I thought you were for beginnings, for innocence and purity, for newness. I thought you were for young girls."

   "Perhaps you don't know that much about me," the unicorn replied.

   Her long, slender neck made her head seem much smaller than it was, and the mane which flowed down the neck seemed as soft as the kiss of a flower. She was not quite the careless color of sea foam, nor that of snow falling on moonlight, but a paler shade of white that lent her an almost spectral appearance.

   If his extraordinary senses hadn't told him otherwise, Kent might have believed her to be a ghost. As it was, he had no doubt of her reality, though for a wild moment he doubted his own.

   "Why have you come to me?" he asked.

   "Because you needed healing, and because I go where I choose to go," the unicorn said in reply. "And because you remind me of someone I knew, long ago."

   He opened his mouth to foolishly ask her what she meant by that, and inspiration struck for the second time this evening. Creatures by nature immortal had no true sense of the passage of time, and so by rights she should have said, "someone I knew once." That she did not meant that she could only be one particular unicorn.

   "Will you not come closer?" she asked, and though he could not remember deciding to do so, Kent approached and looked her in the eye, as he gently brushed the side of her neck.

   She turned a little towards him, so that her horn nearly touched his cheek. "Why do you grieve, this night?"

   "Because my life and the lives of many others who trusted me have been spent without lasting effect. Because I can no more stop the strangeness than I can hold back the tide, and I am not really sure if I want to do so."

   "And?" she prompted.

   "Because ..." And at last he closed his eyes, and a single tear trickled out of each of them. "... because I am loved, and I do not deserve it."

   The horn pressed swiftly against his cheek, and he could no longer move or think, only listen to the voice. "You love," the unicorn said in an oddly harsh tone. "Only those who do not love do not deserve it. You have known many of that kind, and I cannot imagine how you have come to confuse yourself with them.

   "And as for the other, you do what you can. Again, that is more than many can say." The voice was silent for a moment. "You are right that you cannot and should not protect humanity from its own strangeness. Sooner or later, they will have to accept and embrace it, but teaching them to do so is not your task. You are not a teacher, you are a scholar, a soldier and a healer. Your task is to try to understand the strangeness, to protect against the parts of it which can harm, and to set right what goes wrong because of it.

   "You are also correct that there is little that you can do, for good or ill, to change the world. But don't fault yourself for having such limits. Don't fault yourself for being a mortal, and not a god."

   The horn moved away, and Kent returned to himself once more, to watch as the unicorn began to turn away from him.

   As she did, a desperate question was born in him. "Do I really look like him? Like Schmendrick?"

   She paused, but did not incline her head to look at him. "Another person might have thought I meant someone else."

   He shrugged in such a way as to communicate to anyone regarding him that he was not another person.

   "Yes," the unicorn said after a moment, "you do. The resemblance is strong, overpowering other resemblances. Otherwise, I would not have spoken with you."

   Now she did turn to look at him again through clear and unwearied eyes. "Be wary. Your night isn't over yet." And with that she was away, lightly as the shadow of a bird.

   Kent blinked, and looked up to the night sky, seeing the moon which had risen sometime before.

   Quietly, he walked out of the park through one of the locked gates, and headed for the subway entrance. He paused at the top of the flight of stairs leading down into the odd darkness below, and then began his descent.

To Be Concluded

Next: Into the Underworld


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