The Unreasoning Mask Read Online Free PDF Page A

phone and she was sobbing and telling him of the

heart attack. His father had been rushed to the hospital, which was only

half a kilometer down the corridor in the megabuilding. But his father

had insisted that he be taken home, and he was now there in his own bed.
     
     
A half hour later, Ramstan was on the shuttle to New Babylon. Eighty minutes

after embarking, he was on the twentieth level, which held the university

and the staff residences. On opening the door to his parents' apartment,

he found his entrance blocked by someone who was just leaving. He or she

was tall, only half a head shorter than Ramstan. Under a green hood was

the face of a centenarian, deeply wrinkled, the lips absent as if they

had chewed themselves away on the hard edge of time. The nose was long and

sharp, ground thin by a remorseless grindstone. The chin was bony; a few

long hairs bristled from it. Under prominent brows were extraordinarily

large eyes, set very far apart, their color indeterminable in the shadow

of the hood. The body and legs were under a loose green robe, from which

protruded wrinkled spotted feet in sandals. Under one arm was a very large

black book, the old-fashioned printed kind, a collector's item. The arm

covered part of the large Arabic letters on the cover.
     
     
At any other time, Ramstan would have given the ancient in his or her

long-outmoded clothes his full attention. But now, after the stranger

had passed by, he strode into the apartment crowded with relatives

and friends.
     
     
They were chanting the Surat Ya-Sin as he walked through them and into

the bedroom where the gaunt eagle face of his father was still uncovered.
     
     
"When We sent to them two, and they denied them both, so We reinforced

for a third, and they said: We are messengers to you.
     
     
"They said: You are only mortals like us. The Merciful has not sent

down anything. You are lying!"
     
     
After the funeral, Ramstan asked his mother, "Who was that old man who left

just as I entered?"
     
     
By then he had decided that the stranger was male.
     
     
"What old man?"
     
     
"He looked as if he must be a hundred years old. He was dressed in a

hooded green robe, and be carried a huge black book under one arm."
     
     
"I didn't see him," his mother had said. "But there were so many people

there to mourn. He must have been a friend of your father's."
     
     
She gasped, and she held her hand to her mouth, her eyes very wide.

"An old man in green robes and holding a black book! Al-Khidhr!"
     
     
"Don't be silly."
     
     
"He came to record your father's name in his book!"
     
     
"Nonsense!"
     
     
Ramstan had had to leave soon thereafter for the shuttle to Sirius Point.

But the next evening his mother phoned him.
     
     
"Son, I asked everybody who'd been there when your father was dying,

and nobody saw the old man in green carrying a large black book. You were

the only one who saw him! Now do you believe that it was al-Khidhr? And

since you alone saw him, it must be a sign! A good one, I hope!"
     
     
"It's a sign that you hope I'll return to the faith."
     
     
"But if you were the only one to see him!" she had wailed.
     
     
"Then it was my grief. When the father dies, the son becomes a child again,

if only for a little while."
     
     
"No, it was al-Khidhr! Think about it, Had. Your faith isn't dead after

all! Allah has given you another chance!"
     
     
Ramstan had never told his parents how he had seen an old man -- the same?

-- bending over him when he was twelve and sick and had just awakened from

a dream. The old man had been, of course, the tag-end of a fever-inspired

hallucination. Thus, when he had been stricken with grief for his father,

somewhere in his brain a switch had closed, and the old man of the sickbed

dream had been imaged forth again in a circuit. That was all there was

to it. Certainly, he was not going to say anything about him at the academy.

If the authorities heard about