Disclaimer: The top of the cover image is Paramount's, the bottom Warner Brothers', the inset the Television Academy's. As far as I know, nothing in the story itself belongs to anyone else - except perhaps the late Jerome Bixby, on whose original story "It's a Good Life" I drew for some material not found in the episode.
Beneath summer daylight that came from no visible sun, two men walked along a snow-covered dirt track – two weather-beaten old farmers, with postures just too weary to be natural and smiles just too broad to be real. For the most part, they were silent except for inaudible mumbles, though every now and then one of them would remark to the other, apropos of nothing, what a fine thing it was that half their crops had been ruined by the previous night's blizzard.
These remarks came more frequently, and with greater emphasis, as the men came in sight of one particular cornfield. Here, the crops certainly hadn't been ruined; though heaps of snow lay heavy and dripping on the broad leaves, the corn itself glowed green and lush in the not-quite-sunlight. The corn was always green and lush in this particular field – though whether that was because of the strange nourishment beneath it, or because of the one who had put that nourishment there, the men didn't know, and thought it imprudent to wonder too hard.
Unconsciously, they hastened their steps, all the while loudly assuring each other that it was a good thing, a real good thing, that their walk had taken them that way; they wouldn't want to be anywhere else, no sirree; they were as happy as could be to… and then, about halfway past, they both broke off and stopped dead in their tracks, and stared into the field with a degree of horror that even they, for all their six years' practice, couldn't attempt to dissemble.
For the corn was rustling – not lightly, as a bird or a rabbit might make it do, but in the violent, careless way that corn rustled when there was a man, or something else a man's size, walking unseen within it. Plenty of such things had gone into that cornfield, but none had ever come out again – and, until that moment, it had never occurred to anyone to imagine what might happen if one did. But now it had, and now the two men were imagining – and, imagining, stood paralyzed with terror.
Then the stalks parted, and a figure unlike anything they had expected emerged from the cornfield: a tall, slender figure, dressed in brightly colored robes; a figure like that of a man, but totally bald despite his manifest youth, and with a knobby slab of bone covering the entire back of his head. His mild eyes were dreamy and remote, as though preoccupied with grave and solemn thoughts; when he saw the two men, though, he smiled politely enough, and said, with a gesture toward the farmhouse that stood beyond the field, "Pardon me, gentlemen. Would that, by any chance, be the Fremont residence?"
Receiving their dazed nods, he thanked them with a queer little bow, and turned in the direction of the farmhouse. As he went, he paused to pluck a cornflower from between the stalks; he held it up to the light, and stared at it intently for a moment – and then, suddenly, the purple-blue blossom was replaced in his hand by a little ball of feathery white petals, like no Earthly flower the men had ever seen. With a satisfied nod, the figure stowed it in his robes and continued on his way – and the two men, after exchanging the briefest of glances, turned around and headed back the way they had come. Whatever was going on, it was plain that something immense was in the offing, and neither of them cared to be anywhere near when it arrived.
The year was 1961; the name of the place was Peaksville, Ohio. And the figure who had just stepped forth into the daylight was one town's ticket to another and a brighter part of the Twilight Zone.
Amy Fremont was sitting on the front porch, lost as ever in vague and dreamy musings, when she heard someone coming up the steps. She raised her head and turned to glance at the approaching stranger; as she saw him, a queer feeling stirred within her that he was both very strange and intensely familiar, but the rivalry of the two elements prevented either from penetrating the fog of her conscious mind. So she only smiled pleasantly and said, "'Morning, young man."
"Good morning, Miss Fremont," said the stranger, fixing his gaze on her with an intensity that made her remotely uneasy. It was as though he were peering into the very depths of her soul – not with love or hatred, but with a sort of businesslike solicitude, as a mechanic might examine the interior of a broken radio. But, again, the suggestion was too faint to make any real impression on the misty, mazy tangle that was the consciousness of Amy Fremont.
"Have we met, now?" she said with a touch of puzzlement.
The stranger smiled slightly. "Yes," he said. "We have met now – but we had not met before. This is my first time in Peaksville; hitherto, I have lived in… a very different place."
"Is that so?" said Amy, with interest. (She had meant to say, "Is that so, now?", but a faint, uncharacteristic appreciation of the stranger's jest kept the last word from her tongue.) "Fancy. It's been a long time since we had a new face in Peaksville."
"Yes," said the stranger, his face growing solemn once again. "Yes, I suppose it has."
"Will you… be staying very long?" said Amy, with the faintest of hesitations. There was something not quite right about that question, she was aware; when someone new came to town, nowadays, there was something else one ought to wonder instead. It was too difficult to think of, just then, but perhaps in a moment, if she kept trying…
"That depends," said the stranger, his unblinking gaze still fixed on Amy's face. "I am here to do a job; I will stay as long as it takes me to do it."
"Ah," Amy managed. "And what job is that?"
"To make repairs," said the stranger simply.
Repairs… Amy's mind flitted to all the electrical equipment in Peaksville, which hadn't worked in such a long time. Yes, it would be good if some repairs were… but no, wait a moment, that wasn't right. It wasn't that anything was broken, just that there wasn't any power – and that couldn't be repaired, because… why, now?…
And then she remembered the reason why – remembered it, not as the misty background detail that it had so long been for her, but in the round and in full color. It was as though the clouds of her mind had parted and a shaft of sunlight had broken through, which had dispelled, in a single instant, all the murky indistinctness that her nephew's moment of rage had laid upon her consciousness. She knew, once again, who and where she was, and what that being and location meant – and the knowledge was so crisp in hue, so vivid in outline, that the sheer reality of it very nearly terrified Amy Fremont right back out of her newly regained wits.
She raised a trembling hand, and nursed her forehead with a broken little gasp. "What's happened to me?" she murmured. "Where have I been, all this time?"
The stranger smiled in quiet triumph. "On Minbar, we would say that you have been wandering in the marches of the Shadow Realms," he said. "What the human phrase would be, I do not know."
The implications of this last sentence, which only a few seconds before would have escaped Amy utterly, now made her blood run cold with understanding. She looked up at the stranger again, and saw as though for the first time his unearthly garb and his hairless, bone-ringed head – and, had that been all she saw, she would very likely have fled in terror from the porch and the farm. For men and women who live in places like Peaksville are seldom inclined to traffic with inhuman beings from unknown realms.
But she also saw his eyes, and that brought her up short. For there was nothing strange or alien about the stranger's eyes: they were eyes such as any good Ohioan might wish to have, frank, warm, kindly – and familiar. There was no mistaking them; she had seen those exact brown orbs a thousand times before – every time she had met, with the fearless sternness that only she had ever seemed able to muster, the sullen and potent gaze of her young nephew Anthony.
But how could a being from another world have her nephew's eyes? And what sort of being could it be, who denied that he was human, and yet whose eyes were more human than the human's whose eyes they were? Her head swam with the bewilderment of it all; before she could fully recover, her sister-in-law Margery, having heard their conversation from the kitchen, opened the door and poked her head out. "Amy?" she called. "Who's…" Then she caught sight of the stranger, and her voice died in her throat.
The stranger folded his hands into a sort of triangle, and made the same queer bow to her as he had to the two men. "Good morning, Mrs. Fremont," he said. "My name is Lennier. May I come in?"
He seemed to take the vague, spasmodic motion of her hand as a sufficient affirmative; in any case, he stepped inside with a self-assured rustle of robes. The door swung shut behind him, and Amy leaned back dazedly in her chair, shut her once-more-bright eyes, and began the gladly lengthy task of becoming reacquainted with herself.
"Will you have some wine, Mr. Lennier?" Mrs. Fremont offered, rather less hysterically than she had been afraid she might. "It isn't very good – homemade, you know – but…"
"Thank you, no," said Lennier. "Alcohol disagrees with me."
"Oh," said Mrs. Fremont. "Well, perhaps some rosehip tea, then?"
Lennier accepted this offer, and Mrs. Fremont went to light the stove and put the water on. "Anthony's upstairs having his nap," she remarked as she filled the teapot with rosehips saved from last autumn; she didn't know what, if anything, this information would mean to her visitor, but it seemed only decent to mention it.
"Yes, I know," said Lennier.
Whatever reply Mrs. Fremont had been expecting, it wasn't this. "Yes, well," she said vaguely. "And Jonathan is out in the fields, cutting away the… oh, no, I'm sorry, here he is now," she corrected herself, as her husband tramped in from the porch, scythe in hand, and stopped dead in his turn at the sight of their remarkable guest. "Darling, this is Lennier. He's come to… pay us a visit."
Lennier made his bow a third time. "How are you, Mr. Fremont?" he said.
"Fine, fine," said Mr. Fremont automatically. "Real good." He glanced at his wife, and cleared his throat. "So… Lennier, is it? And what's your line, Lennier?"
"Interstellar diplomacy," Lennier replied. "I have the honor to serve as aide to Ambassador Delenn, who represents the Minbari race in one of the galaxy's most vital areas: a semi-autonomous Earth space station known as Babylon 5."
A sharp thrill went through Mrs. Fremont, and she hastily murmured a few irrelevant equations in case her son should happen to be stirring. "You know about Earth, then?" she said, as casually as she could manage. "Earth is important? It's been to space, and built stations? It's… still out there?" she finished with a sudden access of desperate urgency, waving her hand vaguely to indicate the whole universe, if any, beyond Peaksville.
Lennier turned to her, and there was tender pity in his eyes. "About that, Mrs. Fremont," he said gently, "I'm afraid I have no information."
Mrs. Fremont stared. "But… you said the place where you work is connected to Earth."
"Yes," said Lennier. "But not to the Earth on which you were born. You see, Mrs. Fremont, there is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man – or to Minbari, for that matter. It is where shadows give way to substance, and ideas become true things; its inhabitants are to us as is the sun at noon to the last gleams of twilight. And all of us, and all the places we know – Peaksville, and Minbar, and anywhere else that we could ever reach – exist only because various persons in that realm have imagined us, and made worlds for us not too unlike the true one, and given us some small portion of the reality that belongs to them by nature.
"We on Babylon 5 became aware of this a few days ago, when a powerful telepath drew a young military officer out of his own world into ours. There was a certain analogy between them, which enabled the one, upon becoming aware of it, to perceive and realize the other – and, as we studied the vista that this act had opened, I discovered a similar analogy between myself and one of the residents of this town. It seemed to me that the two of us ought to meet – and so," he finished almost apologetically, "here I am."
This account left his hosts momentarily speechless, and it was left to the kettle on the stove to break the silence; Mrs. Fremont jumped sharply at the sound of its whistle, and hurried to pour the water into the old chintz teapot. "Now how strong do you take it, Lennier?" she said, unconsciously following her husband's lead in dropping the honorific. "I know that Reverend Younger – he doesn't drink either, you know, and he won't look at a cup of tea that doesn't nigh on take the roof off his mouth. But he isn't a Minbari, of course…"
"Whatever you think best, Mrs. Fremont," said Lennier.
"Yes, all right," Mrs. Fremont murmured. "Say ten minutes, then?"
"Certainly."
Mr. Fremont chuckled; anyone, he thought, who could so gracefully handle his wife at her most anxious certainly belonged in the diplomatic line. But then he thought of the last thing Lennier had said before the kettle whistled, and his face grew as grave as he dared let it. "So, Lennier, this… analogy of yours," he said. "You mean that one of the folks round here is like you in some way?"
"Very like," said Lennier. "One might say, in a certain sense, identical."
"Which one?"
Before Lennier could reply, there was a noise from the floor above – a soft, muffled thump, such as a six-year-old child might make upon waking earlier than expected and dropping from his bed onto the floor. The Fremonts froze, and matching smiles, as wide, bright, and empty as the rim of the Milky Way, appeared automatically on their faces; Lennier, meanwhile, only raised a sorrowful glance toward the room where his analogue was stirring.
Anthony Fremont had had an uneasy naptime. This was unusual, for ordinarily his sleep was as sound and his dreams as mild as could be, as befitted one whom no mortal power could harm; even the irruption of the previous evening, when that bad Mr. Hollis had tried to get the other townsfolk to bludgeon him to death, hadn't disturbed his rest during the night. But then, round about lunchtime, he had suddenly felt uncommonly tired; upon going up to his bedroom and lying down, he had dozed off almost instantly – and his dreams, as he slept, had been filled with strange mists and waterfalls and brightly colored, shining shapes, all quite unlike anything that had ever been seen in Peaksville. There was nothing conventionally threatening about any of it – indeed, it was, for the most part, quite strikingly beautiful – but to Anthony, for whom anything he couldn't understand and control was simply hateful and inimical, it was nonetheless halfway to a nightmare, and he had woken to find himself curled up in a fetal position and assiduously sucking his thumb.
As he blinked away his lingering drowsiness, he heard voices coming from the kitchen: Mom's voice, yes, and Dad's – and another voice, soft and mild, that Anthony didn't recognize. He considered looking into the speaker's mind to find out who it was, but then decided that he didn't really want to; there was a quality about the voice, somehow, that reminded him unpleasantly of his recent dreams.
Frowning, he wriggled out from under the covers and dropped himself down onto the floor, and was satisfied to hear the voices downstairs fall abruptly silent. People always did stop talking when they knew he was around; if they were still doing it, that meant that the new voice, whoever it was, couldn't be really dangerous to him. Maybe it was even someone he could like; the only way to tell (since he still didn't feel like reading the person's mind) was to go downstairs and see.
Downstairs, therefore, Anthony went, prompting the usual display of effusion from his parents when they saw him. "Oh, Anthony, are you up now?" said Mom with a broad smile. "That's a good thing; it's good for you to be up. Ain't it good that Anthony's up, dear?"
"Sure, it's real good," said Dad, his smile equally broad. "Just as good as it could be, that's what it is. Just as good."
But Anthony ignored them. His attention was focused entirely on the other figure in the kitchen – on the stranger who didn't smile at him, but only stood with erect head and impassive face, and looked straight into the youngest Fremont's fiery blue eyes.
"Hello, Anthony," he said softly.
"Who are you?" said Anthony.
The stranger cocked his head. "Who do you think I am?"
For a moment, Anthony didn't know what to make of this. He was used to people encouraging and praising his use of his powers, but no-one, in all his life before, had ever challenged him to use them. As the idea slowly worked its way into his mind, his face hardened; maybe he wouldn't like this new stranger so much, after all.
But, whatever else Anthony Fremont may have been, he was at least too much of a boy to turn down a dare. So he locked eyes with the stranger, braced himself for the uncanny dreamscapes that might await him, and plunged himself into the stranger's mind.
To his surprise, so far from meeting with an alien extravagance of colors, he found himself confronted with a single shadowy scene in which there seemed to be no color at all. He supposed it was a memory: the stranger was kneeling on the floor of a small room, with his eyes shut and his head bowed, and a single candle burning in front of him. His mouth twitched from time to time as if in vertiginous dread, but his jaw was set in lines of grim resolution.
Then a recessed portion of the wall slid aside behind him, and a woman entered the room. Like the stranger, she was dressed in elegantly flowing robes; like the stranger, she had a completely hairless head encircled in the back by a ring of bone. And it was plain that she knew the stranger well, from the tenderness with which she walked up to him, rested her hand on his shoulder, and whispered gravely, "Lennier?"
The stranger inclined his head without opening his eyes. "Delenn," he said.
"You ought to eat something," said the woman. "You have been meditating continuously for over twelve hours now."
The stranger shrugged. "The universe and I have much to discuss."
"Lennier," said the woman, "when Commander Sinclair asked if you had seen anything in Kosh's crystal, I know that you answered him truthfully. Now I ask you to answer me candidly: Did you see anything?"
The stranger took a deep breath. "Nothing that would help Ensign Chekov," he said.
"But you saw something," said the woman.
"Yes."
"What?"
"Something of which it is better not to speak."
"Lennier…"
"Delenn." The stranger opened his eyes, and raised his head to gaze earnestly into the woman's. "Do you remember the terms in which the Sacral Triad of 7703 condemned the doctrines of Sennaj?"
The woman frowned. "Of course. 'The universe as he conceives it is not unimaginable; to any soul of good will, however, it is utterly intolerable.'"
"Yes," said the stranger. "Intolerable, but not unimaginable. The imagination is indeed a terrible power, Delenn; when G'Kar said so, at this morning's session, he spoke as truly as any Minbari. If we are linked, as Ensign Chekov evinces, to a limitless continuum of imagined worlds, then anything the mind can imagine may be actual in one of these worlds; it is inevitable, therefore, that some of these worlds are as horrible as that envisioned by Sennaj."
The woman's eyes widened. "And you have an analogue in such a world?" she whispered.
The stranger pursed his lips, and turned to stare fixedly at the candle's flame. "Yes, Delenn," he said. "I have an analogue in such a world."
The woman took a deep breath. "Then I cannot blame you for the extravagance of your devotions," she said. "Meditation is given to us to restore the harmony of being to our souls; after such a sight as you have seen, my soul, too, would need a great deal of restoration."
Then she smiled, squeezed the stranger's shoulder, and added, "But you ought to eat soon, all the same. Once the spirit is fortified, the body should be as well; there is little good in being prepared for only half of life's challenges."
The stranger seemed to consider this for a moment; then his jaw stiffened, and he rose from his seat and nodded. "Perhaps you are right, Delenn," he said. "Certainly, I will need all the strength I can acquire where I am going."
The smile died on the woman's face. "Going?" she repeated. "I have authorized no transport off Babylon 5 for you."
"No," the stranger agreed, without turning to look at her. "But I will need no transport; my destination is not reached by anything so complex as jump points. And authorization would be superfluous. What one must do, one may do; that is an authority greater than any Minbari can give or withhold."
"Lennier…" the woman whispered tightly.
"Do you deny it, Delenn?" said the stranger. "Can you imagine the plight of those who share their world with my analogue – who may at any moment have their lives and souls stripped from them by mere immature caprice unrestrained by either empathy or partipotence – and say that one who can aid them is not obliged to do so?"
And the woman couldn't, though it was plain that she wanted to. "But who said that you could aid them?" she demanded.
"You did," said the stranger, still without turning around.
The woman stared. "I? When?"
"When you told Commander Sinclair why Ensign Chekov could read his mind," said the stranger. "If that is how ontic overlap behaves, then it will give me all the power I need."
Even through the colorlessness of the memory, Anthony could see the woman's face turn pale. "Oh," she said. "Then your analogue… and that is why…" She swallowed. "Oh, Lennier, be careful."
At that, the stranger turned at last, and met her gaze squarely. "I assure you, Delenn," he said, "I have no wish that my service of you should end so soon."
The two of them exchanged a long, pregnant look; then the woman closed her eyes, nodded, and turned and left the room. As she did so, the memory began to fade, and the next moment Anthony found himself back in the farmhouse kitchen, with the stranger – Lennier – still staring down unreadably at him from a great height.
For a moment, Anthony's mind was awhirl with feelings he had never had before and only half understood; in short order, though, one all-too-familiar one came boiling to the surface. Immature caprice unrestrained by either empathy or partipotence…
The vocabulary was the first thing that annoyed him. He didn't like it when people used big words; more than one person had been sent to the cornfield for saying "inexorable" or "abomination" in his presence. Granted, the sentence in question hadn't been said anywhere around him, or even to someone who knew that he existed – but, to Anthony, that didn't seem much of an excuse.
But worse than the words themselves was what he knew from the stranger's thoughts that they meant. Partipotence wasn't so bad; that just meant someone who could do some things and couldn't do others. Empathy… he wasn't quite sure about that one. But immature caprice – that meant someone who did whatever he wanted without having a reason for it, because he wasn't grown-up enough inside to be considerate and unselfish. It was a bad thing to say about somebody; if you said it about someone, it meant, at the least, that you didn't like that person.
And the stranger had said it about him…
Anthony's nostrils flared, and he glared up at the stranger with furious hatred in his eyes. "I think you're a very bad man!" he declared.
A little squeak escaped his mother, and his father's hands tightened against the arms of his chair. The stranger, however, only arched a hairless eyebrow and said nothing, and his face, so far from showing fear or intimidation of any kind, only softened into something like pity – which only roused Anthony to even greater fury. How dare anyone pity him? How dare the stranger act as though he was somehow better than Anthony, and knew something that it diminished Anthony not to know? He'd show him who the pitiable one was!
He looked at the stranger's tall, robed figure and smooth, placid face, and pictured it being transformed into the most hideous living monstrosity his imagination could produce. A jack-in-the-box or a human faggot wasn't nearly horrible enough; for what he'd thought, the stranger needed to be something like nothing anyone would have believed possible. Something with all the bones on the outside, like that nasty ugly crest on his head – something with great, ballooning ears coming out of its neck – something with three heads all mixed together, so that the mouth of one was always helplessly gnawing on the chin of another… He added a few more choice refinements in the same style, and then rolled it all together and flung it at the stranger with all the unfathomable power of his godlike brain.
And no sooner had he done so than he cried out in agony, and collapsed onto his knees and clutched his face in his hands. For in the very act of lashing out at the stranger, he had felt himself assaulted by a mutilating force fully as strong as his own power, which seemed to be trying to tear him inside out and split his skull in pieces. For the first time in six years, Anthony Fremont had a taste of what his many victims had felt – though, so far from recognizing that, his only thought amidst the pain was a sense of outraged grievance that something should have hurt him.
It only lasted for a split second; even as his mind retracted inward to fortify itself against the onslaught, the onslaught instantly ceased, leaving only the memory of an agonizing violation to becloud his childish mind. But then, even as he looked, cringing, through his fingers at the unharmed stranger, and mustered his will to strike again, another wrenching spasm assailed him, as momentary as the first, but as effective at cutting his vengeance short.
"What are you doing?" he whimpered. "Why can't I get rid of you?"
The stranger lowered himself onto one knee, and looked Anthony squarely in the eye. "Because we are one, Anthony Fremont," he said. "The same resident of the Daylight Zone has embodied us both, and bound us to one another in the deepest part of our nature; that means that we cannot hurt each other without hurting ourselves in the same way.
"It also means," he added, "that whatever one of us can do, the other can do as well. When essences are united, powers are united as well; thus, if a person can wish for whatever he chooses and receive it, he will find, when he meets his analogue, that that analogue can do so as well – that he can send someone to sleep, repair a damaged mind, or change a cornflower into a Minbari arhash blossom, just by wishing it so. Or –" and here he reached out, lifted Anthony's chin, and looked deep into the boy's sulky eyes "– that he can wish a petty and self-consumed child to know something of what it means to be grown-up, to care for others and despise his own desires – and this, too, will be so."
And so, indeed, it was. No sooner had the stranger finished speaking – if, indeed, it was so late – than Anthony's mind was suddenly flooded with a torrent of images and feelings and ideas, none of which, nor anything like them, had ever entered his head before. There were memories of having left his home and family to join the dedicates of a certain temple; he had often been lonely and homesick at first, but he had persevered nonetheless, because a life of prayer and worship was one that was worth leading. There were memories of many vigils and fasts, by which he had taught himself to subdue the wants and weaknesses of his body and focus on the things that were truly important. And there were memories of meeting Setai Delenn and becoming her aide on her mission to Babylon 5 – and those were the most bewildering of all, for it was plain that he had wanted to have Delenn for his wife more than he had ever wanted anything before, but that his vows and her status made that impossible, and that he wouldn't have changed either of those things if he could have.
Left to himself, Anthony could have made nothing of any of this. In his whole life, he had never known any reason for doing something except that he wanted to do it; the idea of doing otherwise – of not wanting to do what you wanted to do – seemed as absurd to him as calling a bird a corncob. He had heard the words should and shouldn't, and even used them sometimes, but only as things bad people thought when they didn't like what he wanted to do; they had never meant anything to him in themselves.
To the stranger, though, they meant everything – and, thinking with the stranger's thoughts, he saw why. He saw that the first law of reality was that things were to be cherished for what they were, not for what one could gain from them; he saw that to step outside oneself, and to see one's own feelings and desires for the trivialities they were, was the first prerequisite for anyone who wished to be a true person, and not merely a brute beast that happened to be able to talk. And he saw just enough of what that meant – enough fugitive, half-grasped glimpses of the noble richness the stranger's soul had gained through the selfless pursuit of virtue – to know that it was true, and that the life he had led for six years, doing whatever he happened to please and destroying anyone who objected, was a vile, paltry, shameful little life that had made him into a vile, paltry, shameful little boy.
Tears welled up in his eyes – tears that were still nine-tenths self-pity, but that wouldn't have flowed quite so freely if they hadn't contained a tiny germ of something more. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
The stranger nodded. "So you should be," he said. "Do you mean to do better from now on?"
"I guess," said Anthony.
"Good," said the stranger. "You can begin by going out and conversing with your aunt; now that her mind is repaired, she will need someone to tell her of the year she missed. Meanwhile," he added, as Anthony rose to comply, "I will go and see about arranging lodgings for myself."
Anthony's father blinked. "Lodgings?" he repeated. "You're staying in Peaksville, then?"
"For a while, yes," said the stranger. "I don't doubt Anthony's sincerity, but the path of charity is a difficult one to start upon, and it never hurts to have someone around who can hold you to it. Delenn can manage without me for a week or two – even assuming that the time I spend here will equate to any time in my own world, which is by no means certain." He cocked his head. "I trust you don't object?"
"Oh, no, not at all, Lennier," said Mrs. Fremont quickly. "We'll be glad to have you for as long as you want to stay. Only there might be a bit of trouble… we weren't expecting new arrivals, you know, and I don't know how far our town's provisions can…"
Lennier arched an eyebrow, and glanced down at the teacup that his hostess had set out for him some minutes before, and that had been sitting empty and neglected on the kitchen table ever since. Mrs. Fremont automatically followed his gaze, and then jumped as the cup became instantly full to the brim with something that looked like blackstrap molasses and smelled like larkspur potpourri. (It was, in fact, the Minbari ceremonial beverage nazeenuk; Lennier, not being familiar with rosehip tea, had needed some other drink to wish into being to make his point, and the one he had drunk at his temple initiation had been the first to spring to his mind.)
Lennier smiled quietly at his dazed hostess. "I don't think you need worry about my sustenance, Mrs. Fremont," he said. "In any case, you and your husband have more pressing concerns."
"We do?" said Mr. Fremont. "How's that?"
Lennier turned to him, and there was stern pity in the alien attaché's eyes. "For six years, Mr. Fremont," he said, "Anthony has ruled like a tyrant in this house where he ought to have been the subject. I don't say that you and your wife could well have done otherwise – but, nonetheless, the fact remains. And now that Anthony is at last motivated to take his proper place in the economy of human life, it is your task to begin to be to him the figures of law and strength that a boy needs his parents to be. So your first concern right now must be, not where I am to find food and drink, but where you are to find the courage to say no to a demigod."
Mr. Fremont shuddered involuntarily at the thought; still, he saw the force of the injunction, and nodded heavily. "Reckon that's so, all right," he said. "Well, we'll do what we can, anyway. Now that you'll be around to look out for us, maybe it won't be… lord, honey, what's the matter?"
His wife shook her head, and dabbed at her tears with the hem of her apron. "Silly," she murmured. "Only I dreamed so often, when I was a little girl… and then when I was, it was to a monster, and we didn't dare have another…" She looked up at her visitor with gleaming eyes. "Oh, Lennier – to think of you coming all the way from another reality so that one poor woman could finally be a mother!" And she rushed forward and seized the unsuspecting Minbari in a tearful embrace.
It would be unfair to say that Lennier's composure entirely deserted him even now. Certainly, though, the widening of his eyes and his sudden uncertainty about where to put his hands made it plain that this was one eventuality he hadn't foreseen when he set out for Peaksville – and, when his host saw it, the kitchen of the Fremont house resounded with a noise that hadn't been heard there, or anywhere else in Peaksville, for a long time indeed.
Several weeks later, a company of four humans and one Minbari stood gathered about the edge of a lush green cornfield. Anthony's progress in virtue and discipline had been remarkably rapid, and Lennier had decided that it was time to return to Babylon 5 – which had made the others a bit leery, but Lennier assured them that it would be all right. "Wherever I go, the bond between Anthony and me will remain active," he said. "Of course I can't use his powers in my own world, but I can monitor his actions, and bring myself here to intervene and rectify matters should he stumble too severely. But I trust he won't make that necessary," he added pointedly, with a meaningful look that made Anthony glance down and shift his feet self-consciously.
"I don't rightly see how you're going to go back anyway," Amy remarked. "If I've got this right, your mind can't find another world unless there's someone there who was embodied by the same fellow you were. Now that you're here, there ain't anyone like that in your own world, is there? Maybe if you had an identical twin or something, but you've never mentioned anything like that."
Lennier nodded. "Quite right, Miss Fremont," he said. "I cannot find Babylon 5 myself – but I know someone who can, and I have reason to believe that your universe offers me a path to him. Not any part of it that you could reach, you understand, but a sort of sister dimension within the cluster of realities that make up your world, which Anthony's power, if properly exerted, just allows me to touch to the necessary degree."
"Fancy," Amy murmured. "Well, I hope you have a good trip, anyway."
"May I come and visit you sometime?" said Anthony. "If you can come here, I could go there, couldn't I?"
Lennier considered this. "Yes, I believe you could," he said. "Of course, Delenn and Commander Sinclair would have to approve, as would your parents; granted those conditions, though, I should be happy to have you as my guest on some special occasion. Be warned, however," he added, with a small smile. "To sheltered rustics such as we, Babylon 5 can be quite an overwhelming place."
With that, he gave the whole family one last raised-thumb bow, and turned and vanished into the dense greenery of the cornfield. There was a moment's silence, broken only by the roar of a neighbor's tractor and the slowly fading rustle of the cornstalks; then Mrs. Fremont let out a happy little sigh. "Heaven bless him," she said.
"Amen," said Amy.
Mr. Fremont nodded. "Yes, it was a real good day when Lennier came to Peaksville," he said, and lifted Anthony up on his shoulder. "Wasn't it, son?"
Anthony nodded, his eyes still focused unblinkingly on the suddenly-still corn, and on his face one of the first smiles of true happiness it had ever worn. "It sure was, Dad," he said. "A real good day."