Shiva and Other Stories by Catska Ench, Barry N. Malzberg, Cory Ench Page A

the hundredth time he put his hands around his ankle and squeezed, trying to free it from the obstruction formed at the interception of the ledge and surface, but it remained firmly in place. The surface, also sentient, grumbled in reproof, and Hawkins disgustedly gave up and tried to assume a more comfortable position. Circulation had been cut off for a long time, and he assumed that the foot was gangrenous and would probably have to be replaced, but this seemed to be the least of his problems at the present time. “You can’t make me,” he said; “at least I can hold onto that. I won’t be a traitor.”
    “You’re all so stuffy ,” the rock said after a pause. “You’re so involved with abstractions, when what you should realize, as we have, is that your existence is the hub from which the spokes of all being radiate. But I guess you don’t want to become philosophical.”
    “Definitely not,” Hawkins said, “and I’m not a theoretical person, anyway.”
    “Which makes you dull for conversation,” the rock said. It paused again, as it was wont to do; long periods would go by and then the dialogue would begin as if no time had elapsed at all. Perhaps the sentient minerals worked within a different frame or, then again, had to restock themselves. How they spoke, let alone in comprehensible language, was a mystery to Hawkins; he was not a technological sort, either, but more or less a simple man of action. “Anyway,” the rock said after some time, “there is no need for any of this. Actually, we deduced the attack time and method some time ago. We simply put you into a semiconscious state and extracted the information under hypnosis, then removed the memory of that confession from your conscious mind so that when you awoke you thought of time as continuous and the information as secret. I’ve merely been going on in this fashion to amuse myself. As you can imagine, there isn’t much to occupy the time here; we can’t move around much, and very rarely is there anyone to talk to other than minerals who are all parts of the same intelligence.”
    “I don’t believe you,” Hawkins said.
    “You wouldn’t,” said the rock, “and there’s no reason why you should. But, really, does it make any difference whether you do or not? Whatever will happen has already happened; we believe in the inalterability of time and the absence of chaos, here. Note the firmament, for instance. Go on, your ankle has nothing to do with your line of sight. Look up there.”
    Hawkins did so, craning his neck at an uncomfortable angle. The bowl of the sky appeared to be lit with many small fires which alternately flared and sputtered, and beyond the fires he could see a deep golden haze. The haze shimmered toward transparency, and he thought he could see dimly the outlines of many ships.
    “Our force screens,” the rock said rather proudly. “They are being maintained in place by collective energy. At such time as detonating devices hit them, they will self-destruct and explode anything above them to a distance of five hundred miles. So much for your fleet.”
    “I don’t believe you,” Hawkins said weakly. “This is a hallucination. You’re lying to me. You don’t have the means to do this, and even if you did, I’d never under any kind of hypnosis betray the whereabouts of the fleet or the time of the attack. My conditioning forbids it.”
    The rock seemed to shrug, a difficult gesture without hands or shoulders, accomplished through shadow play, perhaps. “That may well be,” it said. “All of this may be hallucinatory, conjured to impress you; but if we have the power to so hallucinate, we certainly have the power to extract secret material from your mind, wouldn’t you think? You’d better face the realities of the matter,” it said rather bitterly. “You’re dealing with a superior form of life here and you always were. If you had shown us a little consideration, it wouldn’t have come to this, but you