In the Wake of Man

by Roger Elwood (ed)

  Then, a short moment later, there was an out-of-order incident, a happening that was not anticipated at all. A person came out of the crowd to the total consternation of all the intuitive people. This was a slight, quick, powerful young man with a big nose, and with sudden moves. This man had been a puzzle around town to various sorts of people; he had been a puzzle even around the Walk-in Art Bijou and the Pelican Press. Stein had named him Deutero-Finnegan because of his supposed resemblance to dead Finnegan and because of the real resemblance of his paintings to those of Finnegan.

  This man was not compelled by the sure intuitions of the crowd to declare himself. But he did so. He left the concourse of the people entering the opera house and went to one of the large bronze basins that held cold human ashes.

  “There is a mistake,” one of the marshals of the opera said to him. “You’re not questioned at all.”

  “This is no mistake,” Deutero-Finnegan said. And he declared himself by putting his hands deep into the ashes. They flamed from his touch, but not with the black-red, reeking flame that had been the case with Zabotski. It was a pale flame, yellow at first, then deepening a bit and shifting to orange color.

  “You can withdraw,” the marshal of the opera said. “We all know you’re not human. We know you’re new and splendid and sane. Why do you young men like to be eccentrics? Why do you love the extravagant gesture?”

  “I won’t withdraw,” the young artist fellow, the Finnegan-image, said. Then his face crumbled and broke with the realization of the pain of his burning hands. “I am human, if I die to be human,” he shuddered the words out. He staggered as he watched the flames and his hands.

  “It’s not quite the right color,” he said. The color deepened a bit when the flesh began to support the flame. “Still not the right color,” the young man croaked as he watched the now rich orange flame. “I’ll have to work on that color.”

  Strong men put a rope around the young painter’s neck and led him into the opera house by the animal entrance. They didn’t inflict the bridle or bit on him.

  Seconds later, there was another out-of-order incident, one still less anticipated than the episode of the double Finnegan. But who was the person who broke out of the concourse and ran toward one of the oracular ashpots?

  “Come along inside!” Duffey was insisting to his party with curious haste. “Come, Sally. Come, Mary Virginia. The show is inside, not here.”

  “Wait, I want to see who it is!” Salvation Sally protested being hurried.

  “Inside, inside!” Stein was insisting with false heartiness. “They are supposed to have some excellent prelude music tonight. We don’t want to miss it.”

  “I’ll not be rushed!” Mary Virginia objected strongly. “Where’s Margaret Stone?”

  But the small party was swept inside by the concourse of people.

  Of course the prelude music was excellent. There was the “Painted Thunder Suite” by Kandarsky. The Countess and the child-hero left the party. “We’re in the bullfight, you know,” they said.

  There was the “Shining Mountain Fugue” by Palfrey. The hoyden left the party. “I’m in the Thunder Colt Games, you know,” she said.

  “Where is Margaret Stone?” Mary Virginia asked again.

  “She must have gotten lost in the crowd,” Salvation Sally said.

  “Nobody could lose Margaret, not anywhere, not ever,” Mary Virginia objected.

  One does not come to the opera house to hear excellent prelude music or to wait overlong for the curtain to rise. It is all right to wait just long enough for anticipation to peak, yes, but then—

  —but then the curtain didn’t rise at all in the Decatur

  Street Opera House that night. Instead

  But Margaret Stone hadn’t entered the opera building with her party. She hadn’t gone in with the press of people. She became instead the least-expected episode of the evening. She was the second of the out-of-order persons who went to the oracular ashpot.

  She put her hands deeply into the human ashes, and these ashes were cold and grainy and dead. She flicked her tongue. She often did this before making a sparky statement. She flicked her tongue again, and there was genuine, Holy Ghost fire playing about it. She scooped up ashes with her tangled and tense and electric fingers and put them to her mouth. They flamed.

  Then she cascaded the handsful of flame over her head and face and arms, and seemed unburned by them. They were garish, tumbling, orange flames.

  “Still not quite the right color,” Deutero-Finnegan had said as he watched from the animal entrance of the opera house.

  “You can withdraw from this childish prank,” the marshal of the opera told Margaret. “You are not human. You have not been charged with any offense. We know that you are superb, that you are noetic, that you are intuitive. Why do so many of the genuine people insist on flamboyant gestures? Withdraw from this insanity thing! Be splendid!”

  “I will not withdraw from it,” Margaret said. “I will be human in death, at least. And I’ll be splendid in flame.”

  They put the rope around her neck to lead her away, but she turned it into a rope of fire that drove all her oppressors back. Then she moved of herself, with that quick, dancing step she used, into the animal entrance of the building.

  Instead of going up, the opera house curtain was sundered to nothing. It was struck by lightning; it was burst and rent by the simultaneous thunderstroke; it was inflamed; and it was gone. The Decatur Street Opera House was the only place in town that employed this effect.

  The scene was a blood-and-sand arena. The act was a bullfight. It wasn’t the Spanish thing; it was the earlier Cretan Bull drama. The music was the “Bull Waltz.” The Countess, the child-hero, and nine other young persons leaped over the bulls, vaulted on their horns, curvetted clear over them, escaping the horns, escaping the hooves. This was all a beautiful action. The young people had their waists drawn very small by bronze cinctures.

  Each of the young persons would defy a bull and do a flying handstand on its horns. Then there would be an interval when the bull was given a human person to mangle to death. The humans were sliced and gored by the curving, whetted horns; they were trampled and torn open by the thunder hoofs; and they were broken to pieces by the violent bull impact. In their being broken open, the humans spewed out some blood, much entrails, and still more trash.

  “It is because we who order their deaths are so intuitive that we force them to reveal their inner essence,” said Cyrus Roundhead, who was in the loge with the Duffey party, “and the inner essence of humans is always trash. Ourselves, who have no inner essence and who are entirely and splendidly on the surface, contain no trash at all.”

  Zabotski was one of the humans to be killed by the bulls. He made a good show. He gave his bull back bellow for bellow. He pawed the sand in mimicry of the bull. He put down his own head to meet the impact. He was dislocated and smashed and broken open, and he died in his own blood and serum and trash. He did, however, give one more defiant bellow after he was dead, a thing that startled the spectators.

  “What we must do is create a cycle of heroic memories of ourselves as a species,” Roundhead was saying. “But wherever will we discover any heroic material to adapt? If only we could acquire it by legacy!”

  After some minutes, the arena scene was that of bears and retiarii, or net wielders. The lithe young people in this act tangled the rushing and maddened bears in their flung nets, took them off their feet with the force of their own rushes, rolled them like huge and angry balls, scorched and burned them with white-hot prods.

  “Is not the music exquisite?” Roundhead asked proudly, for he himself was one of the marshals of the opera. “It’s the ‘Bear Ballet’ by Brhzhlozh.”

  “Brhzhlozh is only a machine,” Mary Virginia said sourly.

  “Certainly,” said Roundhead. “He is an intuitive, music-writing machine. There was once some slight talk of keeping a few unmutated humans to compose our music for us, but the
best opinion was to extirpate every human vestige and to make no exceptions. We are not humans by chromosomic count or blood type or brain wave patterns; we are not humans by passion or estrogen or adrenalin (for we have none of these things at all); we are not humans by mental process or by esthesia. We are forever rid of the human connection. We are the splendid persons, the people without passion.”

  “We sit at opera, and opera was a human thing,” Stein said.

  “Not the blood opera, no,” Roundhead contradicted. “It is all our own, both in its new form and in its ancient antecedents.”

  The maddened bears were slashed out of their entangling nets by the young and splendid leapers. They escaped the onrushes of the released beasts; then human persons were thrown into the arena in the way of the bears. And these humans were broken up and killed in a series of noisy crunchings.

  Then there was the Fire Drake Frolic in which a few more stubborn humans were slain. Fritz’s “Fandango in Three Flames” was the accompanying music.

  The interlude came then. There was interlude music by Mrzorca, and Shining Mountain Bubbly was served to the loge patrons.

  “Opera used to be better,” Mary Virginia said. “Operas were more fun a few years ago, when we were still humans.”

  “None of us was ever a human,” Cyrus Roundhead corrected. “Some of us may have thought we were human. Some of us may have been raised with humans, just as humans had a tradition of humans being sometimes raised with animals.”

  Time flowed by on its smooth and easy surface. Time stood still in its depth. The new simultaneity had no depth. The gracious and rather stylized interlude was cleared away. The presentation of the climax piece of the night began, the Thunder Colt Game. It was orchestrated to the Thunder Torus music. The live, pantomimic game unfolded.

  “When we persons of the thunder dimension attained consciousness, it was a sudden event that instantly overtook every person of us alive,” Roundhead of the splendid mouth was saying. “The world was already in the middle of its baroque being and civilization when we woke to consciousness. The humans have claimed a sort of consciousness, but they cannot mean the same thing by it. I believe that our own awakening to full consciousness was quite recent. Watch now! The awakening to life of our totem animal the Thunder Colt is the symbol of our own awakening to consciousness. Notice that it devours compulsively on awakening. So do we.”

  There was a large Thunder Colt egg in the arena. The hoyden and other young people broke a window into the egg. They took a human person, alive and blaring, and thrust him through the windowhole into the egg. There was then a mindless gnashing and crunching as the still unconscious Thunder Colt inside the egg began to devour the human. With the nourishment, there came a fulgence from within the egg. It was not yet consciousness; it was only the inquiry.

  Answering lightning struck the egg and shattered it open: the Thunder Colt stood up on uncertain and stilted legs. That was the awakening to consciousness.

  Simultaneous thunder struck and infused the colt. That was the awakening to the thunder dimension.

  Then the splendid Thunder Colt, some pieces of the eaten human still protruding from its mouth, leaped clear of its birthing debris and ran riot. The stark music of the Thunder Torus picked up tempo as the game evolved.

  There were only two human persons remaining for the arena. These two were known to be noetic and splendid; they were humans only in their coming deaths and in their depths as persons.

  The Thunder Colt knocked Deutero-Finnegan down with its first assault; it tore off his lower jaw, split his chest, and seemed to lay open layer after layer of persons in turbulent and confused depth.

  “We have the thunder dimension,” the talkative Cyrus Roundhead was saying in the loge, “but I am jealous that there may be other dimensions that we lack. Do we really miss anything by living so entirely on the surface? What we need to find for ourselves is a dimension of depth. It would be fine if some kind and older race would will such a dimension to us, but we look in vain for a source of any such inheritance.”

  The joyous, newly awakened, totem Thunder Colt killed the Finnegan effigy on the second pass, spilled him open in an incredibly mingled and rich juiciness. There was spilled out shouting scarlet blood, crimson blood, high-saturation blue-red blood from the young painter’s body, from the body that really seemed to have had several tenants. There was sulphur-colored blood, saffron-colored blood, flame blood, ichor, and serum mezcolanza. The color was more orange than red or black now. That color, it was the life-garish orange color of all strange artists in their orange periods.

  “Why, he had the right color in him after all.” Margaret Stone laughed. It was almost her last joke.

  “As a species, we should try to create a signature color for ourselves”—Roundhead was talking—“as well as a depth and an intensity. Can we remain splendid forever if we do not add to our repertoire? We’d pick garbage out of the wake of any great people who had gone before us, but where shall we find traces of a great people? We search vainly for a legacy of glory.”

  The Thunder Colt wheeled back and killed Margaret Stone at a single pass. It tore off half of her head with its totemic teeth; it tore out her throat. But it couldn’t go deeply enough to get the laugh in her throat. That’s all she had to leave.

  The Thunder Torus music crashed to an end. Outside the opera house the new and unlegacied breeze was blowing under a gimcracked, jeweled sky.

  Tracking Song

  Gene Wolfe

  Now is the seventh winter since Troy fell, and we Still search beneath unfriendly stars, through every sea And desert isle, for Italy’s “font-variant: small-caps;“retreating strand.

  —Virgil

  I have found that this little device takes in my words, and then, by some mechanism I do not understand, speaks them back to me. A few moments ago I tried to discover how much it would hold, talking for a long time. It held it all. Now I have wiped all that away—there is a button for it—and begun again. I want to leave a record of what has happened to me, so that if someone comes for me, and finds me dead, he will understand. I feel that someone may, though I do not know why. And I want him to understand.

  I do not know my name. The people among whom I find myself, who have been kind to me thus far, call me Cutthroat. This is because I have a reddish-brown birthmark on my throat from one side of the hair behind my neck to the other.

  Each day shall begin with its number. This is the first day.

  These people are taller than I—my head comes only to the shoulders of their men. They say they found me in the snow an hour after the Great Sleigh passed, but what the Great Sleigh is I cannot clearly learn. I thought at first it was a nature symbol (perhaps for a snowstorm); but they say this was the first time they had ever seen it, and that they hid from it in the beginning.

  They carried me here to their camp; since then I have been able to stand up and walk a little, and I find that I can speak their language, though badly. They dress in furs, and their huts are of hides stretched over saplings and plastered with snow. Outside, the wind is blowing more snow, building drifts around the huts. I am lying on furs; the light is a luminous fungus suspended from a rawhide thong and is very dim.

  This is the second day. I woke when one of the women came to me with a stone bowl containing a kind of soup, which may have been intended as a medicine. I asked her about it, and she said they make it by boiling the twigs of a certain tree. It is thin and rather too spicy for my taste, but invigorating. I got up and went outside, and the woman showed me where the men relieve themselves—a sheltered spot about a hundred meters from the camp.

  When I came back the men were gone—hunting, the women said. I told them I would like to have gone with them, saying that I did not want to live on their charity, and would try to contribute more food to the group than I ate. They laughed at me and said that I was too young and small to hunt with the men: This was not malicious, but very jolly and good-natured, so that I felt that I was
at a party (even though I cannot remember any specific party, or in fact anything at all before last night) despite the fact that we were standing in the snow and wind, and it was intensely cold. They also laughed at my coveralls, which are very different from their fur clothes.

  Then they told me they were going to gather food, and I said I would go with them and help them; they thought this was very funny, and made up a kind of song about it, telling how I would step on the various food plants, and complain before the sun was high of the pains in my back.

  But when they had enjoyed themselves. Red Kluy, who I think is the headman’s mother and seems to be the chief woman of the tribe, went into one of the huts and brought out a weapon, saying that I should come with the women and protect them, and kill any game I might see while they were gathering food.

  The weapon, which I still have, consists of a wooden stock, three flat, springy lengths of bonelike (or perhaps hornlike) material, and a thong sling. It can be used to throw stones or chunks of ice, but the proper missile is a sort of bent, double-headed club of very heavy wood, some having both heads studded with points of bone or sharp chips of rock.

  We walked about three kilometers through the snow, which was somewhat less than knee-deep in most places, going in single file and taking turns at breaking the trail. The women’s feet are wrapped in hides and bound with thongs, while I have boots of some black synthetic that is warm and keeps my feet dry. Several times, we passed near trees, since Red Kluy directed us, whenever possible, to the spots where the snow was thinnest, and that most often meant the lee side of thickets.

  Can I call the trees my first surprise? Until I saw them, I had been surprised by nothing, being so stunned at finding myself among these people, with no memory of how I came here, that I was dazed by everything. But although I remember nothing, I find that I have in my mind certain fixed, though imperfect, ideas concerning the uses of objects and the appearances of the things whose names I find ready on my tongue—even though I cannot recall ever having seen them.