Free The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner Page A

my desperately trying to get away from the monster’s beak. And the way I got thrown on shore was a result of the monster trying to get a tasty morsel—me—out of reach of a competitor.”
    “You’re not satisfied with that, are you?” Clary said in an even voice.
    There was a long silence. Kazan stared at her, a haunted look coming and going behind his eyes. He said at last, “No. How could you tell?”
    “You sound as though you’re trying to convince yourself,” she answered.
    He got to his feet and began to pace back and forth in the narrow limits of the walkway between the bunks. “The doctor did warn me,” he said after three turns. “But he said what counted was that now I’ve started to think that I can do something about it again, instead of just refusing to face it because it was too big for me.”
    “You’ve certainly made a start on that,” Clary said, wanting to reassure him. “But something is still worrying you.”
    “Yes, this devil, that’s all. Because if the devil was a clever conjuring trick to delude Bryda, then I didn’t make the steps in the air. I couldn’t have. But Hego was there and saw me do it. Many people saw me. And if the devil was real—”
    He broke off and sat down, his face going pale.
    “What?” she prompted.
    “Then I’m pledged to it for a year and a day,” Kazan said in a dull voice.
    She rose from her place opposite him and sat down beside him, putting her arm round his shoulders in a comforting gesture. She said, “Kazan, why don’t you just think it out? Do you feel that this—this devil is doing anything to you? Haven’t you been shown that your own actions can account for what’s happened? Surely if you can’t find any difference in yourself then that’s the same as there being no difference.”
    “I guess so,” he said wearily, putting his palms up to rub at his eyes in a quick tired gesture.
    “What did the doctor say about that?”
    “Pretty much what you’ve said. Tell you the trouble, though. There’s one man I’d have liked to ask about it, and I can’t, because he’s dead. That was Yarco. He used to sort of hint at the way he felt, never having been his own master. He used to talk about the decree of the wyrds, and about our being at the mercy of the stars. It seemed to make sense to him. It explained his life for him. But I never took the opportunity of talking about it with him, and now I never can.”
    Clary was silent for a moment, frowning. She felt frustrated. Her mind wasn’t used to coping with such abstract problems as these—the nature of possession if there was such a thing, of human destiny, of free will and bondage. She could get an intuitive grasp of the way Kazan must be suffering, but she could not hold on to the concepts long enough to show in words that she understood. But there was something frightening about his predicament, she could tell that, and she was moved to do the only thing she could, which was to show her sympathy.
    She said awkwardly, “It seems to me you could think yourself into his place. It doesn’t seem all that different from having been born in the Dyasthala, to me. That was a weight, too. I made up my mind when I was just a kid that I was going to get out of the Dyasthala, and I worked at it. Learned to read. Learned to count. Took whatever I could whenever I could that looked as if it might come in useful to get me out of there. I’d looked at all the people who didn’t make it. I didn’t want to end like them. Know what I mean?”
    Kazan turned his head and after a moment’s pause nodded.
    “But I guess I wouldn’t ever have made it,” she went on in a lower voice. “Not if they hadn’t cleared the whole quarter and made us get out. There were always too many problems. There was always the one you couldn’t figure out before you ran into it, because it wasn’t part of the Dyasthala’s world. And those were the problems you didn’t get the chance to tackle a second time, so