And then I saw it. High in the air, a few hundred yards away, beyond the meandering stream, a vast presence slowly condensed out of pure power. It was roughly human shaped, though its edges blurred and wavered. A glowing green nimbus surrounded the figure and yellow rays radiated in all directions.
Was Skald a kind of being now? Whatever he was, power leaked out of him as he descended, leaving shimmering trails in the air, charring grass and bushes below him, boiling the water in a nearby duck pond, and heating everything it touched to incandescence.
His touch would kill, though I did not think Skald wanted to kill us just yet. He drifted lower, extending spider-leg projections towards the guards stationed further out and cutting them down in puffs of black smoke. The mongrel!
Everyone was on their feet now, staring up. I could sense his triumph. How Skald loved stalking his enemies. He was savoring our terror. Why would he hurry? He had waited sixteen years.
Flydd appeared beside me, panting.
“What do we do?” I gasped.
“If he’s now a being, he’ll be invulnerable to physical or magical attack. Whatever spell we use on him, he could turn it back a thousandfold…”
“Flydd?” I prompted, when he did not go on.
“Last time you beat him with an emotional attack,” he said quietly. “What are his weaknesses?”
“Umm…Skald never had a great gift for magic. Look at him—power is oozing out everywhere. And I don’t think he knows how best to use it.”
“With that much power, he doesn’t have to. What else?”
Previously, using my empath’s gift, I had sensed out and amplified the agonizing emotions and feelings of Skald’s victims, and deluged him with them. And because the Merdrun had always denied their own emotions, he had been overwhelmed.
I raised my hand to try again. The being that Skald had become drifted towards us, and smiled. The gigantic face was horribly scarred, and his right eye socket was empty.
His voice boomed like thunder, inside my head and outside at the same time, and it shook my bones. I’ve spent the past sixteen years exploring my emotions, Sulien, and learning how to defend myself against such attacks. You can’t touch me now. Give me the Waystone.
“You’re the son of a coward!” I shrieked up at him. “And you’re a coward too.”
He grimaced. Nor can you provoke me. All this time, I’ve been tormented by the most savage accuser of all—myself. The Waystone. Give it to me.
I raked my fingers through my hair, desperately trying to think of a way to attack him. My forefinger stuck to something—a clot of printing ink. I was about to wipe it off on my trews when I saw that it formed a crude letter U.
Was Skald his own most savage accuser? What about Uletta, the only person who had ever loved him? He had loved her, too, yet he had betrayed her and, as she lay dying, she had used up the last of her life laying an unbreakable curse on him and his people. Was she the answer?
“Shard!” I said out of the corner of my mouth to Flydd.
He took the cap off the little pill box. “What are you thinking?”
“You know how to raise people from the dead?”
“Yes, though it’s generally a bad idea.”
“Remember where Uletta was buried?” I nodded towards the mound, partly enclosed in a loop of the stream. “The shard will know her.”
Flydd stared at me for a minute, doubtless weighing possibilities, then held it up, wincing, his fingers smoking where they touched it. He spoke the words of the raising spell and a wraith came up through the nearest mound and drifted towards us, becoming ever more solid as she drew near. A big, strong woman, her features still twisted in the anguish of her betrayal.
“I remember you,” the risen Uletta said as she settled beside me. “You were a little girl. What do you want?”
I looked upwards. “Up there.”
She saw the being formerly known as Skald, and her face hardened.
“Sixteen years ago, you went to your grave seething with hate and bitterness,” I said, “and your dying curse has blighted the world. It’s time to put an end to it.”
Uletta took the glowing green shard. It did not burn her fingers.
Skald looked down, then froze in the air. No human face could have expressed the horror I saw in him.
Go away! he choked.
“Why do you hate me?” said Uletta. “What did I ever do to you but give you my love?”
You cursed me and my people for all time, he said, two parts rage and three parts guilt. And from that day to this, we’ve known nothing but torment.
“You cursed your people when you betrayed me. I merely put it into words.”
Skald raised a smoking fist the size of a small thundercloud, as if to smite her dead, but perhaps his nerve failed him. Or perhaps the guilt got to him.
“When I cursed you before,” said Uletta, “I was just a normal person. But now, raised from the dead and with your shard in my hand, I can have all you have.” She extended a muscular arm. “I’m taking back what is mine.”
Did she hope to regain the life he had drunk, or was it just a goad? Skald let out a desperate cry, turned the fist into a long, ethereal finger and pointed it at her as if to drink her life again. Uletta smiled and folded her arms.
The air crackled. Electric sparks jumped in my hair and stung my scalp.
“Get to shelter!” bellowed Flydd. “Now!”
We scrambled behind the largest tree and the picnickers followed: Mother, wavy gray hair streaming out behind her, my little brother, Gannion, running with a gigantic piece of cake, my dearest friend, Jassika, and a dozen of my old allies.
Dad, ordinarily a clumsy man, got there without spilling a precious drop from his goblet. I covered my face with my hands and peered around the trunk, through my fingers.
Skald cast the life-drinking spell on Uletta. I had seen him use this spell many times in the past, and it was a hideous way to die. She let out such a cry of horror that it shivered my bones. Was she reliving what it had been like last time?
But, as Skald attempted to drink Uletta’s life force, she threw back her head and laughed.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“No one brought back from the dead can have true life,” said Flydd.
A dreadful realization warped Skald’s scarred features, but too late. The power he had drawn from Uletta was the antithesis of that within a normal human life, and it began to annihilate his own life force.
He tried to reverse the spell but the power he had taken from a hundred thousand Merdrun exploded out in all directions. It seared the leaves off the trees, gouged up grass and earth, toppled copses and fences, and blasted all the water out of the stream for hundreds of yards.
And Skald, who had been nothing but power and consciousness, was obliterated.
The ground shook, and all around us charred leaves drifted down, covering the grass like black snowflakes. When it finally stopped there was no trace of the being once known as Skald.
“It’s over,” said Flydd. “He’s been unmade.”
My hands wouldn’t stop trembling I snatched the goblet from Dad’s hand and downed the contents in a gulp. “What…what about the Merdrun in the crater?”
“That cataclysm would have torn his stasis spell apart,” said Flydd, “and no one could have survived it. But they wouldn’t have known. Their torment’s over.”
Uletta squeezed the shard between her strong fingers and it melted, vaporized, and vanished. The last deadly relic of the Crimson Gate that had corrupted the tragic Merdrun long ago, and ruined their hopes and dreams, was gone.
“And I can have peace,” she said.
She drifted back towards her grave, becoming more wraithlike by the second, and plunged down through the grass into the mound.
“How about Malien?” I said quietly.
Flydd put a bony arm around my shoulders. “‘One last adventure,’ she said. She would have been happy to go that way.”
Around us, people emerged from their hiding places, and hugged and laughed and wept. Mother threw her arms around me and my father embraced us both. Suddenly I felt such a vast upwelling of hope and optimism, and the infinite possibilities of life, that for a few seconds, I was floating. The blight on Santhenar had lifted.
I looked back towards my studio, and the work I’d used as an escape all this time. “Damn the etchings!” I said. “Let’s have that reunion.”
The Wind and the Rain
By Robert Silverberg
The planet cleanses itself. That is the important thing to remember, at moments when we become too pleased with ourselves. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. The action of the wind and the rain, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the vigorous rivers flushing out the choked and stinking lakes—these are all natural rhythms, all healthy manifestations of universal harmony.
Of course, we are here too. We do our best to hurry the process along. But we are only auxiliaries, and we know it. We must not exaggerate the value of our work. False pride is worse than a sin: it is a foolishness. We do not deceive ourselves into thinking we are important. If we were not here at all, the planet would repair itself anyway within twenty to fifty million years. It is estimated that our presence cuts that time down by somewhat more than half.
#
Today we must inject colored fluids into a major river. Edith, Bruce, Paul, Elaine, Oliver, Ethel, Ronald, Edward, and I have been assigned to this task. Most members of the team believe the river is the Mississippi, although there is some evidence that it may be the Nile. Oliver, Bruce, and Edith believe it is more likely to be the Nile than the Mississippi, but they defer to the opinion of the majority.
The river is wide and deep and its color is black in some places and dark green in others. The fluids are computer mixed on the east bank of the river in a large factory erected by a previous reclamation team. We supervise their passage into the river.
First, we inject the red fluid, then the blue, then the yellow; they have different densities and form parallel stripes running for many hundreds of kilometers in the water. We are not certain whether these fluids are active healing agents—that is, substances which dissolve the solid pollutants lining the riverbed—or merely serve as markers permitting further chemical analysis of the river by the orbiting satellite system. It is not necessary for us to understand what we are doing, so long as we follow instructions explicitly.
Elaine jokes about going swimming. Bruce says, “How absurd. This river is famous for deadly fish that will strip the flesh from your bones.” We all laugh at that. Fish? Here? What fish could be as deadly as the river itself? This water would consume our flesh if we entered it, and probably dissolve our bones as well. I scribbled a poem yesterday and dropped it in, and the paper vanished instantly.
#
In the evenings we walk along the beach and have philosophical discussions. The sunsets on this coast are embellished by rich tones of purple, green, crimson, and yellow. Sometimes we cheer when a particularly beautiful combination of atmospheric gases transforms the sunlight. Our mood is always optimistic and gay. We are never depressed by the things we find on this planet. Even devastation can be an art form, can it not? Perhaps it is one of the greatest of all art forms, since an art of destruction consumes its medium, it devours its own epistemological foundations, and in this sublimely nullifying doubling-back upon its origins it far exceeds in moral complexity those forms which are merely productive. That is, I place a higher value on transformative art than on generative art. Is my meaning clear?
In any event, since art ennobles and exalts the spirits of those who perceive it, we are exalted and ennobled by the conditions on Earth. We envy those who collaborate to create those extraordinary conditions. We know ourselves to be small-souled folk of a minor latter-day epoch; we lack the dynamic grandeur of energy that enabled our ancestors to commit such depredations. This world is a symphony.
Naturally you might argue that to restore a planet takes more energy than to destroy it, but you would be wrong. Nevertheless, though our daily tasks leave us weary and drained, we also feel stimulated and excited, because by restoring this world, the mother-world of mankind, we are in a sense participating in the original splendid process of its destruction. I mean in the sense that the resolution of a dissonant chord participates in the dissonance of that chord.
#
Now we have come to Tokyo, the capital of the island empire of Japan. See how small the skeletons of the citizens are? That is one way we have of identifying this place as Japan. The Japanese are known to have been people of small stature. Edward’s ancestors were Japanese. He is of small stature. (Edith says his skin should be yellow as well. His skin is just like ours. Why is his skin not yellow?)
“See?” Edward cries. “There is Mount Fuji!” It is an extraordinarily beautiful mountain, mantled in white snow. On its slopes one of our archaeological teams is at work, tunneling under the snow to collect samples from the twentieth-century strata of chemical residues, dust, and ashes.
“Once there were over seventy-five thousand industrial smokestacks around Tokyo,” says Edward proudly, “from which were released hundreds of tons of sulfur, nitrous oxide, ammonia, and carbon gases every day. We should not forget that this city had more than 1.5 million automobiles as well.” Many of the automobiles are still visible, but they are very fragile, worn to threads by the action of the atmosphere. When we touch them, they collapse in puffs of grey smoke.
Edward, who has studied his heritage well, tells us, “It was not uncommon for the density of carbon monoxide in the air here to exceed the permissible levels by factors of two hundred and fifty percent on mild summer days. Owing to atmospheric conditions, Mount Fuji was visible only one day of every nine. Yet no one showed dismay.”
He conjures up for us a picture of his industrious ancestors toiling cheerfully and unremittingly in their poisonous environment. The Japanese, he insists, were able to maintain and even increase their gross national product at a time when other nationalities had already begun to lose ground in the global economic struggle because of diminished population owing to unfavorable ecological factors. And so on and so on.
After a time we grow bored with Edward’s incessant boasting. “Stop boasting,” Oliver tells him, “or we will expose you to the atmosphere.” We have much dreary work to do here.
Paul and I guide the huge trenching machines; Oliver and Ronald follow, planting seeds. Almost immediately, strange angular shrubs spring up. They have shiny bluish leaves and long crooked branches. One of them seized Elaine by the throat yesterday and might have hurt her seriously had Bruce not uprooted it. We were not upset. This is merely one phase in the long, slow process of repair. There will be many such incidents. Someday, cherry trees will blossom in this place.
#
This is the poem the river ate:
Destruction
I.Nouns. Destruction, desolation, wreck, wreckage, ruin, ruination, rack and ruin, smash, smashup, demolition, demolishment, ravagement, havoc, ravage, dilapidation, decimation, blight, breakdown, consumption, dissolution, obliteration, overthrow, spoilage; mutilation, disintegration, undoing, pulverization; sabotage, vandalism; annulment, damnation, extinguishment, extinction; invalidation, nullification, shatterment, shipwreck; annihilation, disannulment, discreation, extermination, extirpation, obliteration, perdition, subversion.
II.Verbs. Destroy, wreck, ruin, ruinate, smash, demolish, raze, ravage, gut, dilapidate, decimate, blast, blight, break down, consume, dissolve, overthrow; mutilate, disintegrate, unmake, pulverize; sabotage, vandalize, annul, blast, blight, damn, dash, extinguish, invalidate, nullify, quell, quench, scuttle, shatter, shipwreck, torpedo, smash, spoil, undo, void; annihilate, devour, disannul, discreate, exterminate, obliterate, extirpate, subvert; corrode, erode, sap, u
ndermine, waste, waste away, whittle away (or down); eat away, canker, gnaw; wear away, abrade, batter, excoriate, rust.
III.Adjectives. Destructive, ruinous, vandalistic, baneful, cutthroat, fell, lethiferous, pernicious, slaughterous, predatory, sinistrous, nihilistic; corrosive, erosive, cankerous, caustic, abrasive.
“I validate,” says Ethel.
“I unravage,” says Oliver.
“I integrate,” says Paul.
“I devandalize,” says Elaine.
“I unshatter,” says Bruce.
“I unscuttle,” says Edward.
“I discorrode,” says Ronald.
“I undesolate,” says Edith.
“I create,” say I.
We reconstitute. We renew. We repair. We reclaim. We refurbish. We restore. We renovate. We rebuild. We reproduce. We redeem. We reintegrate. We replace. We reconstruct. We retrieve. We revivify. We resurrect. We fix, overhaul, mend, put in repair, retouch, tinker, cobble, patch, darn, staunch, caulk, splice. We celebrate our successes by energetic and lusty singing. Some of us copulate.
#
Here is an outstanding example of the dark humour of the ancients. At a place called Richland, Washington, there was an installation that manufactured plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. This was done in the name of “national security,” that is, to enhance and strengthen the safety of the United States of America and render its inhabitants carefree and hopeful. In a relatively short span of time these activities produced approximately fifty-five million gallons of concentrated radioactive waste. This material was so intensely hot that it would boil spontaneously for decades, and would retain a virulently toxic character for many thousands of years.
The presence of so much dangerous waste posed a severe environmental threat to a large area of the United States. How, then, to dispose of this waste? An appropriately comic solution was devised. The plutonium installation was situated in a seismically unstable area located along the earthquake belt that rings the Pacific Ocean.
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