The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “Get back to the beach where you belong,” snapped Chine. “It would be better for us all if the Quicklies took you, one day.”

  “May God go with you, you young sinner,” said the priest, Dad Ose, unctuously.

  Chine had shot the priest a look of piggy ferocity, suspecting him of enlisting divine protection for Manuel in the youth’s encounters with the rapacious Quicklies.

  And this stormy evening Manuel was once again risking his life—or at least chancing the destruction of the Simulator, the most wonderful object he’d ever possessed.

  Misty clouds swirled before the machine, a three-dimensional image thrown by a battery of projectors on the front of the cabinet. The clouds took on form, substance and pattern. This was Manuel’s favorite image: The Storm. He’d created it himself, out of his own mind, with the aid of a helmet that fed his thoughts into the cabinet.

  “Ya-heeeee!”

  The yell meant the Quicklies had sighted Manuel. They’d been racing about the beach randomly, like speeding electrons, so fast that the eye could hardly follow them, kicking up sand, splashing through the shallows, actually running across the surface of the water like basilisks and vaulting the waves. They yelled and leaped, and occasionally fell to fierce quarreling. As Manuel watched, one of them, a little smaller than the rest, slowed down, aged and died. It fell to the sand, revealing itself as a chimpanzee-sized humanoid with a large head, hairless, very thin.

  “Ya-heeeee!”

  The Quicklies arrived. Manuel felt the usual nervous tightening of the throat. He gulped and with his foot pushed the parrot fish toward an area of blurred disturbance in the sand. Then he snatched his foot away. You couldn’t be too careful, and despite his skepticism about Chine’s theories, he couldn’t suppress the vision of his foot becoming instantly skeletal, gleaming white.

  In fact the fish became skeletal. He never saw the Quicklies eat them: One second the iridescent scales were glowing in the moist air, the next second the bones lay dispersed in little heaps, the flesh absorbed into the Quicklies’ phenomenal metabolism.

  Then, as happened sometimes, some of the creatures began to stand comparatively still, watching him, blinking with unbelievable rapidity, so that their big eyes appeared out of focus. The outline of their bodies was blurred too, since it is not possible for Quicklies to stand completely motionless.

  They babbled at him in the thin rattle of sound that he’d never been able to understand. It seemed to him that they talked faster every time he met them, and he had a scary thought: Maybe they were in fact speeding up toward the point where they simply became invisible and were able to do completely as they pleased.

  They were sitting down! This was something new. One by one each upright form disappeared, to be instantly replaced by a sitting one. They sat in a circle, watching the Simulator with wide eyes. One keeled over and died, its outline firming up. It was an old, old man, tiny and pathetic, not in the least threatening. The body remained for a moment, then disappeared. Manuel refused to consider what had happened to it. The other Quicklies continued to watch the Simulator.

  The colors of Manuel’s mind-painting played. They swirled in a curious helical pattern like smoke or clouds. They were turquoise and gray, joyful and sad, and they were reflected at the lower part of the painting in a way that suggested wet sand and sea and things found and lost. They were wonderful and unique in each moment, and they represented the perfect amalgam of art and technology—the strange mind of a young dreaming Wild Human named Manuel and the invention of some long-forgotten scientist who had found how to give substance to those dreams.

  And the Quicklies were crying.

  They sat blinking and blurred, and it was odd to see the tears running down those joggling faces just like normal tears, just as slow and trickling. The Quicklies sat there aging, using up the few precious hours of their lives in contemplation of Manuel’s masterpiece, while they cried at the beauty of it. And yet—so it always is with art—they were not satisfied. One of them was trying to communicate with Manuel. She raised her hand. She was a middle-aged female and she spoke with excruciating care—and each syllable took her a subjective month to say. But her meaning reached the boy. For the first time ever, a Quickly had spoken to him. She spoke, and she died, carried away in late middle age by some undiagnosed disease that ran its course in two seconds.

  She had said: It needs more love.

  The Rainbow—Earth’s great computer that sees everything and knows everything and still has not run down—recorded that scene. And over the millennia to come, historians would puzzle over that moment and speculate on the identity of that determined little Quickly who devoted her last years to one purpose, to one sentence that was to plant a seed of knowledge in the mind of young Manuel, later to become celebrated as the Artist in The Song of Earth.

  Manuel regarded the mind-painting, and he thought about the word love and the emotion it might describe. He’d put into that painting something that embarrassed him, something that had caused him to keep the machine and its projections away from other people, to hide it from those prying fingers that delved through his possessions whenever he was not at home.

  He didn’t know the thing was called “love.” But the word sounded right. And he was not alone.

  Somewhere, other people knew of love. It just so happened that up to now he’d never met anyone else who possessed it. Wild Humans have basic needs, such as staying alive and breeding, and love was a luxury they had lost a long time ago. Nobody in the village possessed it.

  He’d hidden his love because others might laugh at it—as Ellie had laughed at it—but he’d shown it privately to the machine. And now the Quickly woman

  said he hadn’t shown enough. What else did the mind-painting need? Helplessly, he looked back at the Quicklies.

  Two more lay dead, disappearing even as he watched. Others looked terribly old. He was wasting their time. Hastily he switched off the machine, ignoring their twitters of despair, and carried it back to its hiding place. When he returned, the Quicklies were gone. They must have been starving. Some distance out to sea the water was in a turmoil. The Quicklies were probably fishing, knifing through the water with a speed no fish could match.

  For a while he sat and watched the storm clouds gathering, big merino clouds just as Insel had forecast yesterday, sending a gusting wind as a storm messenger. Then he stood, glanced around and found everything in order, murmured a word of encouragement to his vicunas and entered his shack.

  The Storm

  He sat in his chair, dismissed an intrusive image of Ellie’s warm body, put on the helmet and relaxed, watching the projection area. He began systematically to discipline his thoughts, concentrating on the storm.

  Manuel’s images swirled. The walls of his shack trembled to the wind. Something pattered on the roof and rolled off. The sounds did not distract him; they were essential to his mood. He thought loneliness, he thought the wind, the broad beach, the creatures that burrowed into the wetness. The sea. He was painting another storm—and this time he was trying to put more love into it.

  The images firmed but they were not right, not what he wanted. The shapes suggested women’s bodies—breasts and buttocks. The gale took on an appearance of long tawny hair, swirling. He forced his thoughts toward the elements themselves, rather than the images they dragged from his subconscious. The breasts became sails, full and straining, the lithe limbs formed the geometry of a ship. He thought of Man and the ocean, of death and power. The projection area showed shapes without form but with infinite strength—almost terrifying. Manuel shivered and took the helmet off. He was beginning to get a feedback effect from his own projected thoughts. And he hadn’t got the love in there, even now.

  He remembered the day he’d been given the machine. A nothing day, when he’d tired of the beach, tired even of the ocean, and walked into the hills until even the great Dome was a small bubble behind him and his breath came quickly from oxygen starvation. A day of strang
e unrest when he wondered at everything: the Dome, the sky, the village, the purpose. A day of changes.

  As he lay on his back catching his breath and watching alpaca clouds, he heard a voice.

  “Manuel.”

  A tall woman stood there, dressed in a black cloak. Her face was pale and her eyes regarded him dispassionately. Some versions of the legend relate that she then cried, in a ringing voice, “Arise, Manuel, and fulfill your destiny!” And she may have, but the Rainbow says not. Reality is never quite so dramatic as legend, although it can be interesting enough.

  The woman stood, and Manuel lay looking at her—rather sulkily, resenting her air of authority. She carried a smooth-sided box. Finally, Manuel climbed to his feet and leaned against a stunted tree.

  “I must talk to you, Manuel. You are young and naturally rebellious, but I am hoping you will have the sense to listen to what I say and not treat it as the ravings of an old woman. And I am old, older than you could ever guess.” She watched him calmly and coldly, and there was something unearthly about her that cowed Manuel and made him bite back the sharp reply that rose readily to his lips. It seemed the wind had stopped blowing now and the horse clouds hung motionless, as though pinned to the backdrop of the sky.

  Manuel swallowed and said, “I’ll listen.”

  “You are going to be a famous man, Manuel. In the distant Ifalong minstrels will sing of your exploits—and of your companions. You will have adventures such as men have never dreamed of.”

  “The Ifalong?” The word was unfamiliar.

  “You probably think of Time as a single thread extending into the future and never ending. That is the general view in your village. But you must think of Time as a tree, Manuel. A tree that grows forever, always creating new branches.”

  “That would be a big tree,” said Manuel, thinking literally.

  “Out in the Greataway there is a tree called the ‘beacon hydra.’ It extends a thousand kilometers into space and is so huge that its very bulk will affect the orbit of its planet. I want you to think of Time as bigger even than the beacon hydra. Each branch and each twig represents a possibility where your future life might take one course or another, depending on what you do. Or what others do. The possibilities are infinite, and each possibility is called a ‘happentrack.’

  “The Ifalong is the total of all these happentracks in the future, when there are a billion different ways things might have happened.”

  “Oh.” He thought about that for a while and it seemed to make sense. “And how about the Greataway? What’s that?”

  “The Greataway is just about everything, Manuel. In the old days, when your race used to travel in three-dimensional ships, they called it ‘High Space.’ But Space is all bound up with Time too, and could consist of an infinite number of happentracks. The ‘Greataway’ is the name for all of that.”

  “Who are you?” asked Manuel. “How do you know all these things?”

  “I am a Dedo,” said Shenshi, for it was she. Then she laid the box on the ground beside Manuel. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s an old machine. They were popular many years ago. You are an unusual boy for your time, Manuel, and I think you will find this machine interesting.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Nothing that does not come from yourself. It will help you develop your talents, ready for that day when the Triad is formed and Starquin is released from the Ten Thousand Years’ Incarceration. Then your purpose will be fulfilled, and mine, too.” Her voice was utterly without emotion, as flat as if produced by a machine.

  There was something about Manuel’s purpose being fulfilled that struck a sinister note with the boy. He gulped and looked into the hooded eyes of the woman, but could read nothing there.

  He blinked, and she was gone.

  He carried the Simulator home. He was an inquisitive boy, as well as an intelligent one, and he soon found out how to put the helmet on his head and arrange his thoughts and produce his mind-paintings. Others tried, people who spied on him and wondered at his machine. They sneaked into his shack and donned the helmet, and some of them produced representational images: a particular hill, a jaguar, the Dome.

  Only Manuel could coax feeling out of the Simulator, however.

  The door burst open and the gale swirled around the room, bringing sand and weed, knocking things over. A man stood there, peering into the gloom. “Manuel?”

  “Yes?”

  It was Hasqual. Although a villager, Hasqual was a wanderer at heart and only the thin air kept him in the vicinity of Pu’este. On occasions when the winds shifted, he’d been gone for months, returning with tales nobody believed, disturbing yarns that frightened the kids.

  “This is going to be a bad storm, Manuel.”

  “I know.” The youth’s face was somber in the diffused light from the Simulator.

  Hasqual watched the images abstractedly. “You’d better come up to the church for the night—most of the village is there. Some of the roofs have gone already. A heavy sea could sweep right over this place of yours, and the tide’s coming in fast.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “You’re a damned fool, you know that?”

  “It’s not your problem.”

  “Suit yourself.” Hasqual was gone and the shack was empty again. Manuel went to the window and looked at the storm. Rain was drilling against the crystal. Some trick current of the wind made it stream upward and sideways, rather than down. Now the clouds became patchy, the rain intermittent. The wind was rising still, driving salt puddles across the beach, whining about the woodwork of the shack. Manuel wanted to shout, to sing. It grew darker, and the storm became a secret monster, tromping around out there, occasionally bellowing.

  He went outside and secured the crude storm shutters against the windows. He dragged his boat farther from the water, finally tucking the craft right under the cliff near the shack. His vicunas were gone, probably sharing with Hasqual a presentiment of giant waves. Manuel returned to the shack and stood dripping in the middle of the floor in the darkness, feeling drunk, feeling omnipotent with the richness of the air.

  The colors played before the Simulator. Manuel wondered about kindling a lamp, but decided against it. He stood watching the tiny shifting clouds; then he sat down and put the helmet on again. Carefully suppressing the elation that threatened to exclude everything else from his mind, he thought of the hurricane. He allowed the tumultuous sounds from outside to soak into his brain. The twisting clouds in the mind-painting ordered themselves; the foreground became a realistic contrast to the fantasy of weather. He thought a crab—and a crab appeared in the picture: not factual, just a suggestion sidling across wet sand.

  Something pounded on the door.

  The painting was beautiful, yet it still lacked that indefinable element. Manuel tried a few thought—images; ships, fish, storm-tossed trees. They didn’t work. He erased them hastily before they intruded upon the colors of the storm itself.

  Outside, the wind rose to a sudden crescendo. The pounding on the door intensified.

  Manuel tried people in his picture, slipping in girls, forgetting them as quickly. They didn’t fit, either. They were too... earthy.

  He became aware of the door. He removed his helmet and listened. He heard a voice, a cry of desolation, of distress, of loss. It struck something deep inside Manuel—not simply because he was a compassionate person, but more because he felt a strange and wild recognition, as though the cry had come from within his own soul.

  So now he wondered if he’d imagined it. He listened, breathless. He heard it again: a sobbing. A cry for help.

  Now he thought he’d be too late. He ran to the door and fumbled with the heavy bar, releasing it and throwing it aside. The wind snatched the door out of his hand and crashed it against the wall. Something fell to the floor and smashed. Manuel stood in the open doorway, staring... That moment is caught forever in a million minds. It will never
be forgotten so long as there is a memory in the Rainbow, so long as Man walks or crawls or oozes.

  The Storm-Girl

  She stood in a deep drift of coarse weed, and tiny crabs crawled around her legs. More clumps of weed flew past, wind-borne. One wrapped around her shoulder and she flinched, shaking it off. She stood blinking at the diffused light of the Simulator with blue eyes, watching the miniature storm with wonder and a little fear, her long fair hair plastered wetly around her neck and trailing away like the tatters of a flag in a battle. She wore a ragged loinskin and not much else; just the remains of a fine skin shirt clinging to one breast, leaving the other bare. She was a picture, a storm-painting of beauty and perfection distilled from a thousand myths.

  “Come in!” shouted Manuel as a wall-hanging flew past him, sucked out into the wild night. He saw the tide, only meters away.

  The girl entered and he forced the door shut, barring it again. She stood in the center of the room, water flowing from her body, eyes downcast, her clothes stuck to her. She said nothing. Her stance was oddly submissive; possibly she was in shock. She was different from any girl, from any human Manuel had known. She was incredibly slim, with none of the heavy-chestedness of the village girls, yet a quiet strength flowed from her.

  “What were you doing out there?” Helplessly, Manuel regarded her. “Maybe you’d like a hot drink.” He forced himself to stop staring and busied himself about the shack, puffing the dull embers of his hearth into life, throwing on dry brushwood, so that it crackled and blazed and the girl looked like a goddess of fire. He poured milk into a pot and stirred in a pinch of peyote, then hung the pot from a hook among the flames. He looked around, wondering what else he ought to do. He wasn’t used to company. “Here, dry yourself,” he said, hating himself for his thoughtlessness and handing her a fur. “And here’s a dry robe.”

  She took off the remains of her clothes, watching him with blue eyes set in a grave, oval face with a small nose and round chin, saying nothing. The mouth was sad, but he felt it would smile nicely, given something to smile at. The impossibly slender body was strong, with neat pink-tipped breasts and solid thighs. Manuel was staring again. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. She dried herself and drew the robe around her body.