Herbert, Frank - Soul Catcher

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Soul Catcher (v1.1)

Frank Herbert, 1972

He was Katsuk, the core from which all perception radiates. And his victim was David

Marshall, the 13 year old son of an Undersecretary of State, an innocent chosen from the

white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance.

When the boy's father arrived at Six Rivers Camp, they showed him a number of things

which they might not have revealed to a lesser person. But the father, as you know, was

Howard Marshall and that meant State Department and VIP connections in Washington,

D.C.; so they showed him the statement from the professor and the interviews with the

camp counselors, that sort of thing. Of course, Marshall saw the so-called kidnap note and

the newspaper clippings which some of the FBI men had brought up to the camp that

morning.

Marshall lived up to expectations. He spoke with the measured clarity of someone to

whom crises and decisions were a way of life. In response to a question, he said:

'I know this Northwest Coast country very well, you understand. My father was in lumber

here. I spent many happy days in this region as a child and young man. My father hired

Indians whenever he could find ones who would work. He paid them the same wages as

anyone else. Our Indians were well treated. I really don't see how this kidnapping could be

aimed at me personally or at my family. The man who took David must be insane.'

Statement of Dr Tilman Barth, University of Washington Anthropology Department:

I find this whole thing incredible. Charles Hobuhet cannot be the mad killer you make him

out to be. It's impossible. He could not have kidnapped that boy. You must not think of him

as criminal, or as Indian. Charles is a unique intellect, one of the finest students I've ever

had. He's essentially gentle and with a profoundly subtle sense of humor. You know, that

could just be our situation here. This could be a monstrous joke. Here, let me show you

some of his work. I've saved copies of everything Charles has written for me. The world's

going to know about him someday ...

From a news story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The most intensive manhunt in Washington history centered today on the tangled rain

forest and virtually untouched wilderness area of the Olympic National Park.

Law enforcement officials said they still believe Charles Hobuhet, the Indian militant, is

somewhere in that region with his kidnap victim, David Marshall, 13, son of the new United

States Undersecretary of State.

Searchers were not discounting, however, the reports that the two have been seen in

other areas. Part of the investigation focused on Indian lands in the state's far northwest

corner. Indian trackers were being enlisted to assist in the search and bloodhounds were

being brought from Walla Walla.

The manhunt began yesterday with discovery at the exclusive Six Rivers boys' camp that

young Marshall was missing and that a so-called kidnap note had been left behind. The note

reportedly was signed by Hobuhet with his pseudonym 'Katsuk' and threatened to sacrifice

the boy in an ancient Indian ceremony.

The note left at Cedar Cabin, Six Rivers, by Charles Hobuhet-Katsuk:

I take an innocent of your people to sacrifice for all of the innocents you have murdered.

The Innocent will go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place. Thus will sky and

earth balance.

I am Katsuk who does this to you. Think of me only as Katsuk, not as Charles Hobuhet. I

am something far more than a sensory system and its appetites. I am evolved far beyond

you who are called hoquat. I look backward to see you. 1 see your lives based on cowardice.

Your judgments arise from illusions. You tell me unlimited growth and consumption are

good. Then your biologists tell me this is cancerous and lethal. To which hoquat should I

listen? You do not listen. You think you are free to do anything that comes into your minds.

Thinking this, you remain afraid to liberate your spirits from restraint.

Katsuk will tell you why this is. You fear to create because your creations mirror your true

selves. You believe your power resides in an ultimate knowledge which you forever seek as

children seek parental wisdom. I learned this while watching you in your hoquat schools. But

now I am Katsuk, a greater power. I will sacrifice your flesh. I will strike through to your

spirit. I have the root of your tree in my power.

On the day he was to leave for camp, David Marshall had awakened early. It was two

weeks after his thirteenth birthday. David thought about being thirteen as he stretched out

in the morning warmth of his bed. There was some internal difference that came with being

thirteen. It was not the same as twelve, but he couldn't pin down the precise difference.

For a time he played with the sensation that the ceiling above his bed actually fluttered as

his eyelids resisted opening to the day. There was sunshine out in that day, a light broken

by its passage through the big-leaf maple which shaded the window of his upstairs bedroom.

Without opening his eyes, he could sense the world around his home -- the long, sloping

lawns, the carefully tended shrubs and flowers. It was a world full of slow calm. Thinking

about it sometimes, he felt a soft drumbeat of exaltation.

David opened his eyes. For a moment, he pretended the faint shadow marks in the

ceiling's white plaster were a horizon: range upon range of mountains dropping down to

drift-piled beaches.

Mountains ... beaches -- he'd see such things tomorrow when he went to camp.

David turned, focused on the camp gear piled across chair and floor where he arid his

father had arranged the things last night: sleeping bag, pack, clothing, boots ...

There was the knife.

The knife stimulated a feeling of excitement. That was a genuine Russell belt knife made

in Canada. It had been a birthday gift from his father just two weeks ago.

A bass hum of wilderness radiated into his imagination from the knife in its deer-brown

scabbard. It was a man's tool, a man's weapon. It stood for blood and darkness and

independence.

His father's words had put magic in the knife:

'That's no toy, Dave. Learn how to use it safely. Treat it with respect.'

His father's voice had carried subdued tensions. The adult eyes had looked at him with

calculated intensity and there had been a waiting silence after each phrase.

Fingernails made a brief scratching signal on his bed-room door, breaking his reverie. The

door opened. Mrs Parma slid into the room. She wore a long blue and black sari with faint

red lines in it. She moved with silent effacement, an effect as attention-demanding as a

gong.

David's gaze followed her. She always made him feel uneasy.

Mrs Parma glided across to the window that framed the maple, closed the window firmly.

David peered over the edge of the blankets at her as she turned from the window and

nodded her awareness of him.

'Good morning, young sir.'

The clipped British accent never sounded right to him coming from a mouth with purple

lips. And her eyes bothered him. They were too big, as though stretched by the way her

glossy hair was pulled back into a bun. Her name wasn't really Parma. It began with Parma,

but it was much longer and ended with a strange clicking sound that David could not make.

He pulled the blankets below his chin, said: 'Did my father leave yet?'

'Before dawn, young sir. It is a long way to the capital of your nation.'

David frowned and waited for her to leave. Strange woman. His parents had brought her

back from New Delhi, where his father had been political adviser to the embassy.

In those years, David had stayed with Granny in San Francisco. He had been surrounded

by old people with snowy hair, diffident servants, and low, cool voices. It had been a drifting

time with diffused stimulations. 'Your grand-mother is napping. One would not want to

disturb her, would one?' It had worn on him the way dripping water wears a rock. His

memory of the period retained most strongly the whirlwind visits of his parents. They had

descended upon the insulated quiet of the house, breathless, laughing, tanned, and

romantic, arms loaded with exotic gifts.

But the chest-shaking joy of being with such people had always ended, leaving him with a

sense of frustration amidst the smells of dusty perfumes and tea and the black feeling that

he had been abandoned.

Mrs Parma checked the clothing laid out for him on the dresser. Knowing he wanted her

to leave, she delayed. Her body conveyed a stately swaying within the sari. Her fingernails

were bright pink.

She had shown him a map once with a town marked on it, the place where she had been

born. She had a brown photograph: mud-walled houses and leafless trees, a man all in

white standing beside a bicycle, a violin case under his arm. Her father.

Mrs Parma turned, looked at David with her startling eyes. She said: 'Your father asked

me to remind you when you awoke that the car will depart precisely on time. You have one

hour.'

She lowered her gaze, went to the door. The sari betrayed only a faint suggestion of

moving legs. The red lines in the fabric danced like sparks from a fire.

David wondered what she thought. Her slow, calm way revealed nothing he could

decipher. Was she laughing at him? Did she think going to camp was a foolishness? Did she

even have a geographical understanding of where he would go, the Olympic Mountains?

He had a last glimpse of the bright fingernails as she went out, closed the door.

David bounced from bed, began dressing. When he came to the belt, he slipped the

sheathed knife onto it, cinched the buckle. The blade remained a heavy presence at his hip

while he brushed his teeth and combed his blond hair straight back. When he leaned close to

the mirror, he could see the knife's dark handle with the initials burned into it: DMM, David

Morgenstern Marshall.

Presently, he went down to breakfast.

Statement of Dr Tilman Earth, University of Washington Anthropology Department:

The word katsuk is very explicit in Hobuhet's native tongue. It means 'the center' or the

core from which all perception radiates. It's the center of the world or of the universe. It's

where an aware individual stands. There has never been any doubt in my mind that Charles

is aware. I can understand his assuming this pseudonym.

You've seen those papers he wrote. That one where he compares the Raven myth of his

people to the Genesis myth of Western civilization is very disturbing. He has perceived the

link between dream and reality -- how we seek to win a place in destiny through rebellion,

the evil forces we build up only to destroy, the Great Conquests and Great Causes to which

we cling long after they've been exposed as empty glitter. Here ... notice his simile for such

lost perceptions:

' ... the fish eyes like gray skimmed milk that stare at you out of things which are alive

when they shouldn't be.'

This is the observation of someone who is capable of great things, as great as any

achievements in our Western mythology.

It had begun when his name still was Charles Hobuhet, a good Indian name for a Good

Indian.

The bee had alighted, after all, on the back of Charles Hobulet's left hand. There had

been no one named Katsuk then. He had been reaching up to grasp a vine maple limb,

climbing from a creek bottom in the stillness of midday.

The bee was black and gold, a bee from the forest, a bumblebee of the family Apidae. It's

name fled buzzing through his mind, a memory from days in the white school.

Somewhere above him, a ridge came down toward the Pacific out of the Olympic

Mountains like the gnarled root of an ancient spruce clutching the earth for support.

The sun would be warm up there, but winter's chill in the creek bottom slid its icy way

down the watercourse from the mountains to these spring-burgeoning foothills.

Cold came with the bee, too. It was a special cold that put ice in the soul.

Still Charles Hobuhet's soul then.

But he had performed the ancient ritual with twigs and string and bits of bone. The ice

from the bee told him he must take a name. Unless he took a name immediately, he stood

in peril of losing both souls, the soul in his body and the soul that went high or low with his

true being.

The stillness of the bee on his hand made this obvious. He sensed urgent ghosts: people,

animals, birds, all with him in this bee.

He whispered: 'Alkuntam, help me.'

The supreme god of his people made no reply.

Shiny green of the vine maple trunk directly in front of him dominated his eyes. Ferns

beneath it splayed out fronds. Condensation fell like rain on the damp earth. He forced

himself to turn away, stared across the creek at a stand of alders bleached white against

heavy green of cedar and fir on the stream's far slope.

A quaking aspen, its leaves adither among the alders, dazzled his awareness, pulled his

mind. He felt abruptly that he had found another self which must be reasoned with,

influenced, and understood. He lost clarity of mind and sensed both selves straining toward

some pure essence. All sense of self slipped from his body, searched outward into the

dazzling aspen.

He thought: I am in the center of the universe!

Bee spoke to him then: 'I am Tamanawis speaking, to you ... '

The words boomed in his awareness, telling him his name. He spoke it aloud:

'Katsuk! I am Katsuk.'

Katsuk.

It was a seminal name, one with potency.

Now, being Katsuk, he knew all its meanings. He was Ka-, the prefix for everything

human. He was Katsuk, the bird of myth. A human bird! He possessed roots in many

meanings: bones, the color blue, a serving dish, smoke ... brother and soul.

Once more, he said it: 'I am Katsuk.'

Both selves flowed home to the body.

He stared at the miraculous bee on his hand. A bee had been the farthest thing from his

expectations. He had been climbing, just climbing.

If there were thoughts in his mind, they were thoughts of his ordeal. It was the ordeal he

had set for himself out of grief, out of the intellectual delight in walking through ancient

ideas, out of the fear that he had lost his way in the white world. His native soul had rotted

while living in that white world. But a spirit had spoken to him.

A true and ancient spirit.

Deep within his innermost being he knew that intellect and education, even the white

education, had been his first guides on this ordeal.

He thought how, as Charles Hobuhet, he had begun this thing. He had waited for the full

moon and cleansed his intestines by drinking seawater. He had found a land otter and cut

out its tongue.

Kuschtaliute -- the symbol tongue!

His grandfather had explained the way of it long ago, describing the ancient lore.

Grandfather had said: 'The shaman becomes the spirit-animal-man. God won't let animals

make the mistakes men make.'

That was the way of it.

He had carried Kuschtaliute in a deer scrotum pouch around his neck. He had come into

these mountains. He had followed an old elk trail grown over with alder and fir and cotton

wood. The setting sun had been at his back when he had buried Kuschtaliute beneath a

rotten log. He had buried Kuschtaliute in a place he never again could find, there to become

the symbol tongue.

All of this in anguish of spirit.

He thought: It began because of the rape and pointless death of my sister. The death of

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摘要：

SoulCatcher(v1.1)FrankHerbert,1972HewasKatsuk,thecorefromwhichallperceptionradiates.AndhisvictimwasDavidMarshall,the13yearoldsonofanUndersecretaryofState,aninnocentchosenfromthewhiteworldforanancientsacrificeofvengeance.Whentheboy'sfatherarrivedatSixRiversCamp,theyshowedhimanumberofthingswhichtheymi...

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Herbert, Frank - Soul Catcher

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