Gordon R. Dickson Read Online Free PDF

of those years
that my fight finally came to an end. I did not give up, because I could not;
but the time came when my mother disappeared completely. She went away on one
last trip and never came back. So at last I was able to stop struggling; and as
a result I came to the first great discovery of my life, which was that nobody
ever really loved anyone. There was a built-in instinct when you were young
that made you think you needed a mother; and another built-in instinct in that
mother to pay attention to you. But as you got older you discovered your
parents were only other humanly selfish people, in competition with you for
life's pleasures; and your parents came to realize that this child of theirs
that was you was not so unique and wonderful after all, but only a small savage
with whom they were burdened. When I understood this at last, I began to see how
knowing it gave me a great advantage over everyone else; because I realized
then that life was not love, as my mother had told me it was when I was very
young, but competition—fighting; and, knowing this, I was now set free to give
all my attention to what really mattered. So, from that moment on I became a
fighter without match, a fighter nothing could stop.
    It was not quite that sudden and
complete a change, of course. I still had, and probably always would have,
absent-minded moments when I would still react to other people out of my early
training, as if it mattered to me whether they lived or died. Indeed, after my
mother disappeared for good, there was a period of several years in which Beth
clung to me—quite naturally, of course, because I was all she had—and I
responded unthinkingly with the false affection reflex. But in time she too
grew up and went looking somewhere else for attention; and I became completely
free.
    It was a freedom so great I saw most
people could not even conceive of it. When I was still less than half-grown,
adults would remark on how strong-minded I was. They talked of how I would make
my mark in the world. I used to want to laugh, hearing them say that, because
anything else was unthinkable. I not only had every intention of leaving my
mark on the world; I intended to put my brand on it and turn it into my own
personal property; and I had no doubt I could do it. Free as I was of the love
delusion that blinkered all the rest of them, there was nothing to stop me; and
I had already found out that I would go on trying for what I wanted as long as
it was there for me to get.
    I had found that out when I had
fought my mother's withdrawal from us. I had not been able to stop struggling
against that until it had finally sunk in on me that she was gone for good. Up
until that time I had not been able to accept the fact she might leave us. My
mind simply refused to give up on her. It would keep going over and over the
available data or evidence, with near-idiot, unending patience, searching for
some crack in the problem, like a rat chewing at a steel plate across the
bottom of a granary door. A steel plate could wear down a rat's teeth; but he
would only rest a while to let them grow again, and then go back once more to
chewing, until one day he would wear his way through to where the grain was. So
it was with me. Pure reflex kept the rat chewing like that; and, as far as I
was concerned, it was a pure reflex that kept my mind coming back and back to a
problem until it found a solution.
    There was only one way to turn it
off, one I had never found out how to control. That was if somehow the
knowledge managed to filter through to me that the answer I sought would have
no usefulness after I found it. When that happened—as when I finally realized
my mother was gone for good—there would be an almost audible click in my
mind, and the whole process would blank out. It was as if the reflex suddenly
went dead. But that did not happen often; and it was certainly not happening
now.
    The problem my mind would not give
up on at the moment was the