The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  Manuel pulled himself together and poured her a drink. It was barely warm, but the peyote would do her good. He guided her to his chair and she sat down. She sipped at the drink, her gaze wandering around the room, pausing here and there before returning to Manuel. She still hadn’t spoken.

  Soon the mug was empty, and he took it from her, placing it on a shelf. When he turned back, she was asleep. He sat on the floor and watched her for a long time, saw her lashes lying against her cheek, watched the slow rise and fall of her breasts where the robe had fallen open, admired her hair, her nose, her toes. She slept on. He wanted to awaken her, to talk to her. He hadn’t heard her voice yet. It occurred to him that she might not speak his language.

  As he sat irresolute, his gaze fell upon the Simulator, still projecting its storm-image, recalling his mind to the hurricane that buffeted the shack.

  He placed the helmet on his head, keeping his eyes on the images.

  He thought.

  A paleness appeared among the wild eddying of clouds, at first formless but becoming clearer by the second. It was a face, a girl’s face, melancholy and oval, with a round chin, blue eyes and a cloud of fair hair flying in the wind. The hut shook to a fresh blast. For a long time Manuel sat there, taking the helmet off in case the girl-image became too definite, watching the shift and play of color while the wind howled in from the sea and the girl lay asleep. It was not perfect. It needed days of work, yet. Other moods must be captured within the complex patterns of the Simulator, other images to lend the creation depth. It was not perfect, but the basic elements were there. The storm, and the girl.

  It was a beginning...

  By morning the main force of the storm had moved inland, ploughing a furrow of destruction fifty kilometers wide across the villages of the coastal strip before disappearing into the interior and spending itself among the mountains and ruined cities. The villagers of Pu’este returned to their huts—or what remained of them—and began resignedly to reroof while the strength of the rich air remained in the valley. The guanacos remained, too. They had been converging on the village for days, and now they formed a vast carpet of life that had to be shoved aside before repairs could commence.

  Insel cocked an eye at the tattered sky. “Snake clouds,” he murmured, but Chine told him to shut up and help with the roofs.

  Down on the beach, Manuel’s shack was virtually untouched. Snug under the overhanging cliff, it had sheltered him and the girl while the storm passed overhead and the surging tide spent itself just short of his door. Now he went outside to inspect the damage.

  There were a few shingles missing from the roof, but he could fix that soon enough. And it didn’t matter that the entire building had shifted slightly on its base. His boat was still intact, lashed securely to the exposed roots of a cliff-side vine. He untied it and dragged it to its accustomed mooring beside a rocky shelf that had once projected a few meters into the sea but was now part of a sandy peninsula. The forces of the storm had changed the geography of the beach, and the pattern of rivulets and lakes in the flat sand was altered, too.

  After a storm the beach was usually strewn with weed: kelp and wrack scoured from the deeper reaches of the continental shelf. The weed today, however, was like nothing Manuel had ever seen. It was scattered over the sand in vast blanketlike areas, and it had drifted against the cliff base in layers like emerald felt, each layer a meter thick. It rose against the corner of the shack too, green and fibrous, like ripped pieces of some giant mat, and its scent was powerful and heady. Manuel identified it as the source of the strong ozonic smell that he’d associated with his burst of creative energy the previous night.

  He returned thoughtfully to the shack.

  The girl was up, walking about with a dancing, light-footed motion as though she could not trust the solidity of the floor. She wore the robe he’d given her, but it hung open, showing breast and thigh. She seemed heedless of the chill the wind had left behind. She watched his approach gravely. Manuel, struck speechless by her beauty once more, uttered a croak, cleared his throat and finally said, “How do you feel?”

  “I feel so heavy that my ankles might break. And the ground is so hard, here.” Having made this unusual pronouncement, she regarded him with interest. “You look very strong.” With her dancing, gliding step she came to the door and looked around at the beach, the sandstone cliff and the storm debris. Finally, she looked at the sea for a long time.

  A tear started at the corner of one slanting eye.

  “Who is your king?” she asked, as he kicked weed from the doorway.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who is in charge of you? Who do you work for?”

  “I work for myself. I’m Manuel. I fish and hunt... And I do mind-paintings,” he added, indicating the equipment. The box was switched off. Inside, the memory of his recent painting was stored with many others, awaiting recall at the touch of a button.

  Wrapped loosely in the robe, the girl toured the room, picking up ornaments, artifacts, pieces of rusted, ancient machinery and examining each with absorbed attention. She particularly liked a bright stone on a silver necklace and held it up to the light, exclaiming at its brilliance.

  Manuel watched her, wondering. “You have beautiful things here,” she said. “You must be a very wealthy man.”

  “Not really. Here... Here’s something you’ll like.” He switched on the Simulator. The colors began to play.

  “What is it?” She stared at the images, then smiled for the first time. “It reminds me of home. That’s a storm, is it? Oh... And is that me? It’s beautiful, Manuel.”

  “It’s not finished. There’s a lot more I want to do.”

  “You mean... you did it? You made it yourself?” She frowned. “I don’t see how you managed to get my picture into that box.”

  “While you were asleep.” He explained the workings of the machine to the best of his scanty knowledge, and she seemed to understand.

  Her name was Belinda, and she spent most of that morning in fascinated exploration of his possessions. Later he got her to sit for him and he captured her image on another channel. Then he went back to his first painting, The Storm. She sat smiling faintly at him while he watched her and allowed his impressions of her personality to fill out and lend depth to the images.

  Without his conscious volition, ragged blocks of the fibrous weed intruded themselves into the bottom foreground of the picture...

  Belinda cooked the evening meal. She prepared a kedgeree of clams, kelp and other things that she’d gathered from the tidal flats, together with herbs from the low-lying meadows to the north. She’d been searching the salt grass for some time that afternoon, and Manuel had kept his eye on her, climbing to the top of the cliff in order to follow her movements and make sure she didn’t wander away altogether. Behind him the guanacos were stirring, clambering to their feet, so that the lowlands rippled with brown and gray. The leading animals were picking their way delicately up the rocky hillside and disappearing over the crest, their instincts telling them that the time of rich air was over for a while and that they should head off northwest to the grazing lands, following a pattern established over a thousand generations.

  Manuel had watched them go, and there was the beginning of a terrible regret in him. When Belinda had finally returned from her wandering, she was oddly breathless and pale...

  The meal was delicious. Manuel couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten so well. But when he complimented Belinda she said, “I could have done better with a sun oven.”

  She never volunteered any information about herself; neither did Manuel ask. It was enough that she was there, sharing the shack with him. After supper they sat in comfortable silence while the tail end of the gale blew itself out and the sea birds returned to scavenge the shore for leavings. Later Manuel took her hand and, finding no resistance—why had he expected any?—led her to bed. There was almost a desperation in the way she responded to his lovemaking. And afterward she
clung to him, and he marveled at it. For the first time in years he didn’t feel alone in his emotions. But much later he awakened and heard her crying, a quiet breathless sobbing. He didn’t dare to ask what the matter was.

  They slept late. When they finally arose, the tide was in. Chunks of matted weed floated high on the water.

  “I wish I could live here forever,” she said that evening, as they sat in the doorway and watched the wheeling gulls and the sun turned the mountains crimson and the smell of oyster stew pervaded the shack.

  There was a thumping in his chest. “Why can’t you?”

  She said nothing, but an expression came over her face that he’d seen on the night she came to him: a forlorn look, a kind of resigned sadness. Then the artist in him responded and he put the helmet on and captured the essence of her mood—without knowing the reason for that mood, but maybe guessing it. They ate, and now he was sad, too. When they made love that night it was Manuel who was the desperate one, who lay awake for hours listening to her shallow, too fast breathing, who in the end had to awaken her and say, “Don’t ever leave me, Belinda...”

  She said nothing. She hugged him, her heart racing against his chest, then she just lay there. He couldn’t tell whether she was asleep or not.

  The next day the village was empty of guanacos and the mood of elation was a memory. The villagers pottered about in desultory fashion and Insel watched the clouds. Over the next two days, the restlessness grew in Belinda. Manuel was forced to abandon his mind-paintings while she moved about the shack, tidying the already tidy shelves, frequently sitting down to recover her breath. Once she cut herself and lay in a half-faint, the blood oozing slowly, dark and strange, from a small wound in her finger. Manuel bandaged her and kissed her, then sat regarding her helplessly. He didn’t know what to do, and at the back of his mind was the terrifying knowledge that he was losing her. He put the silver pendant around her neck, partly as a sign of love, partly, perhaps, as a mark of possession...

  That morning he went out into the rain and dug the beach for clams. He found himself throwing the mats of weed against the walls of the hut, as though to enclose Belinda in a blanket of life. But the weed itself was dying now and the ozone tang changing to the stink of putrefaction. He found himself thinking of the Life Caves in the hillside a kilometer away: Belinda’s symptoms were very similar to those of the Chokes. But the beach and the ocean were important to her, and maybe she couldn’t have withstood even that short journey. In any case, could he condemn her to a cave for the rest of her life?

  Then one morning he awakened with a feeling of aloneness. He stretched out an arm. The bed was empty. Hoping still, he ran across the room and threw open the door—maybe she was digging clams. The tide was in, buoying up the rotting weed and other storm debris. The beach was empty. The water heaved tiredly and quietly. She was gone—as he had known she must go in the end—and now his life was as empty as the gray horizon.

  Shantun the Accursed

  The Song of Earth is the name given to that great spoken-and-sung history of Mankind that arose at the beginning of the Dying Years and that spans the period from the arrival of Starquin to the present day, when various creatures gather in lonely places for storytellings.

  The most important characters in The Song of Earth are not the Triad—that is, the Oldster and the Artist and the Girl-with-no-Name—of which Manuel was a member. Because those three are human, however, the human minstrels understandably gave them the leading role in the great events leading up to the Battle with the Bale Wolves, the removal of the Hate Bombs and the release of Starquin from his Ten Thousand Years’ Incarceration. But the Triad lived and died over a short period of time around the 143rd millennium, a microscopic speck of time when considered against the sweep of the Ifalong. Although the minstrels do not admit it, the Triad was just a means to an end.

  Infinitely more important among Earth residents are the Dedos, those creatures of mystery who shaped the course of terrestrial events from beginning to end, by a word here, a suggestion there and the gift of a machine to a young man named Manuel...

  The Dedos have their own legends, cold, emotionless tales of Purpose. One such tale is that of Shantun the Accursed, who brought shame on the Rock Women for all time. It is a cautionary tale, told to emphasize the importance of the Duty, told to the Dedos’ daughters over the long millennia of their childhood, told again and again so that its impact will constantly be refreshed in those memories that must of necessity be ancient—yet never told to humans until now.

  In the beginning, Starquin the Five-in-One created the Rock Women, and he called them Dedos, meaning “fingers” in an ancient Earth tongue. He created them from his own essence and from material plentiful on Earth and suitable to the characteristics of that planet. Already the Greataway was seeded with his Rocks, which acted as relay stations for his Traveling. Now he set the many-faceted Rocks at certain points on the continent of Pangaea—and he set the Rock Women down with them, and charged them with a Duty.

  The Duty is so strong that no Dedo can help but obey it, because it is carried within the fabric of her flesh in the form of a gene. To fulfill the Duty is the sole purpose of the Dedo, the sole reason for her creation. Or it was, until the infamous deed of Shantun the Accursed.

  The Duty is to the Rock and to those who travel by means of the Rock. When a Traveler in the Greataway approaches, the Rock will glow on one or more of its facets. It may also utter a high-pitched hum. The Dedo, on seeing the glow, will place her palm on the lighted facet. Then the essence of the Traveler will combine with her own—but briefly, just long enough for her to divine his intentions. Whereupon she touches another facet that speeds the Traveler to the next Rock on his route, which might be kilometers or light-years away. The Traveler will only occasionally appear physically at the site of the Rock—indeed, in most cases the Traveler is not of a species that has physical form. But the Dedo, absorbing his essence, will inevitably learn a little of his psyche.

  In the year 92,640 Cyclic, the human race discovered that the Greataway consists of infinite dimensions in space/time spanning the routes between Rocks. It was illogical, it was impossible—yet humans discovered how to travel through it and arrive intact at their destination without ever discovering the existence of the Rocks or, indeed, of the Dedos. The Rocks flickered weakly as the humans passed through, but these new Travelers needed no assistance from the Rock Women.

  Starquin pondered.

  Then, a few centuries later, he charged each Dedo with a new Duty: Whenever the Rock should give that characteristically weak flicker that signified that a human was taking a free ride, she should put her hand to the facets to absorb the human’s psyche and intent. And if the Dedo absorbed the intent, then so did Starquin, because he was in constant psychic contact with her. He was a part of her and she of him, in simple human language.

  Starquin charged the Dedos with this new Duty because he did not trust the humans, who were savage and immature compared to other users of the Greataway.

  But it was too late to embody this new Duty in the Earth Dedos’ genes

  Wuhan had felt the first sign of failing powers over 30,000 Earth-years ago, so she had given birth to a child who had bred true, becoming a girl. She named the child Shantun and taught her everything about the Duty, the ways of living and humans. They lived through difficult times when the humans were numerous, but they concealed themselves well, and the Rock, too. During certain ages when human technology bloomed and it seemed they would fill every corner of the Earth with themselves and their machines, they even lived among humans as part of their society, using their cunning to conceal the Rock from them. Then humans would die back again and the machines would rust, and life would become simpler.

  Shantun grew slowly by human standards, but in 30,000 years she had attained the stature of a human child of eight, and her mental powers were well beyond that. However, because she was immature, her emotions still existed and were childish. By now the
humans had moved away, and Wuhan and Shantun lived in the purple pavilion, which is the Dedos’ tradition. The climate was going through a temperate period and living was easy.

  “Mother, now that the humans are gone, doesn’t time seem to pass more slowly?” Shantun sat at the entrance to the pavilion in the afternoon sun, watching the animals gathering at the waterhole, lion and wildebeests in temporary truce.

  Wuhan glanced at her, not with love, but with that indescribable together-emotion that a Dedo alone feels for her parthenogenetic child, who is essentially the same person as herself.

  “It’s just that human lives are so short that they live them as busily as they can. So we tend to hurry, too. Now they’re not common in our area and we can live at our own pace.”

  “Do you like the humans?”

  “Like?” Wuhan affected not to understand—a mere pretense.

  “Well, you know... Do you ever feel any other duty, besides the Duty?” This was a clumsy way of putting it, so Shantun indicated the injured dik-dik she was ministering.

  “Would I feel obliged to tend a sick human, and would I feel fulfilled after doing it?” Wuhan thought. “Probably not. The whole thing is too irrational.

  It could never be compared to the satisfaction of answering a Call. That is joy. Sometimes when a Traveler’s essence enters me and I feel the warmth of his psyche, I get so weak I could faint. I break out in a sweat, and there’s a sensation that grows inside my body until my skin wants to explode with the pain and joy of it. You wouldn’t know, Shantun—but your time will come when I’m gone. To you right now, it is just the Duty. But when you are mature—when you become a Dedo—it is the Joy.” And she looked sternly at her child, to impress her with the awe of it all.