The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “Humans are animals. I like this animal.” Shantun patted the dik-dik, which was struggling to its feet, the Healing Stone having done its work.

  “The Duty is paramount. Do not waste the Healing Stone, and set that creature free, Shantun!” The older woman was conscious that the conversation had gone too far—that her daughter might dare to question the Unity of Purpose, next. “A Dedo must have bonds with none but Starquin himself. That is the Logic. You are behaving like a human.”

  “I’ll tie him up for the night.” Shantun attached a thong to one of the pavilion poles, then tied it lightly around the dik-dik. The tiny antelope pushed her arm with its nose and the girl was oddly moved. There must be something more than the joy of Duty. There had to be. “He can’t go out in this dark,” she explained lamely.

  “You have time.” Wuhan’s voice was resigned. “You have aeons to get this foolishness out of your head, fortunately.” So saying, she composed herself for sleep and Shantun departed into her half of the pavilion. Outside, in a charmed circle, gnus and zebras grazed, alert to give warning of the approach of any night predator. The Dedo had some power over them, too.

  So night came to the veldt, and with it came the night prowlers—the big cats, leopard and lion. Another cat was abroad that night too, one that did not need to rely on stealth, so swift was he. He walked slowly on long legs, his long tail held low but ready for use as a counterbalance when he went into his bounding, swerving run. He walked quietly, and the gnus and zebras ignored his coming because he was not a hunter of such large game. Although his pace was swift, his jaws were small. In all, he was a curiously built animal, and The Song of Earth tells a strange tale of his ancestry.

  And now he heard something, and his instinct told him the prey was small and suited to his talents. He uttered a low cough and went into his run, because now he could see it, tiny in the starlight, and helpless.

  Wuhan awoke to a snuffling noise. She swung her feet out of the bed and parted the entrance flaps of the pavilion, and saw what she saw. And something irrational happened inside her, something her ability to see into the Ifalong had not allowed for. She moved to protect a creature that was not of her own species. She tried to snatch the kicking dik-dik from the cheetah’s jaws.

  Shantun heard the noise too, and rushed from her bed. But now the cheetah was gone. Her mother lay on the dusty ground. The dik-dik stood nearby, trembling, wounded. Wuhan had suffered the worst wound, however. Small and elderly, she had fought the cat off, only to suffer a dreadful gash across the throat. Already she had lost much blood, and she was soon to die.

  Shantun dropped on her knees beside her. “What happened?” In the dark she couldn’t see the worst of it.

  Wuhan tried to speak, but failed.

  “I’ll get you into the pavilion. You’re hurt.” Shantun was strong. She began to pick her mother up.

  Wuhan tried to struggle, to say something, but her speech was gone.

  And nearby, the Rock flickered...

  Just the faintest flicker, but Wuhan knew. And she knew she must get to the Rock and gain contact with the human Traveler, for Starquin’s sake. She tried to shake off Shantun, and when she realized the girl was too strong for her, she tried to shout, to point. The Rock! The ROCK!

  Shantun was crying, “Oh, Mother, you do feel it. You do know what I mean—this liking for other creatures. You protected the dik-dik, and the cat hurt you for it. Oh, Mother, I like you so much!” Only then did she feel the blood, and a chance shaft of moonlight showed the well of her mother’s throat. “Mother!”

  THE ROCK!

  “Oh, Mother...” Shantun laid the small form on the ground again, gently, and the tears fell from her face onto her mother’s. “This is my fault. I should never have brought the dik-dik home. It was injured and I should have left it out there to die, because that’s the way of life on Earth, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” She ran for the Healing Stone, but returned too late.

  Wuhan twitched once, appeared to be trying to move her left hand, then sighed and was still forever.

  And something entered Shantun, possessing her, firming her resolve. “A Dedo must have bonds with none but Starquin himself, and my mother has paid for her transgression—and mine, too, perhaps. Now I see the Logic and I will transgress no more.” She untied the dik-dik and it limped away. She walked over to the Rock and touched it experimentally for the very first time.

  The Rock was cold and dark and quiet.

  “I dedicate the rest of my life to this Rock and to you, Starquin,” said Shantun formally. That is the story of Shantun the Accursed, she who brought shame on the Rock Women for all time, for she was an evil woman, and a wretched one, because she paid heed to human ways. She neglected the Duty, questioned the Unity of Purpose and denied the Logic—and she was responsible for the death of a Dedo, her mother. As a result, her name is held in everlasting contempt by the Rock Women, for she failed to heed the calling of the Rock.

  The Rock had flickered and humans had traveled the Greataway without the knowledge of Starquin. It could have been anyone, any insignificant trader with a cargo of harmless goods, stealing a ride.

  But it was not just anyone...

  It was the Three Madmen of Munich. When humans discovered the Greataway, they traveled it by means of a process they called the Outer Think, which was distinct from the Inner Think, a longevity process. They had begun to spread, and other peoples had begun to take notice. One such people—who have never been seen with human eyes—lived on a world known simply as the Red Planet.

  The progress of Mankind had annoyed the people of the Red Planet, who moved in with a frightful Weapon that capitalized on Mankind’s greatest fear.

  Earth threw up her defenses in the year 93,763 Cyclic, almost 50,000 years before Manuel met Belinda. Earth sent up the Hate Bombs.

  The Hate Bombs were areas of insane psy that spanned the happentracks of each Greataway path. They were not tangible. They were essentially a bloated human emotion, the quintessence of murderous insanity, held in place and sustained by the mysterious force lines of the Greataway.

  They were planted by three devils specially cloned from ancient genetic material. The virulence of the Hate Bombs made it impossible for any living being to traverse that area of the Greataway. It effectively sealed off Earth from the attacks of the Red Planet. It also sealed her off from her own colonies.

  More disastrously, the Hate Bombs trapped Starquin in a terribly small area just a few light years across, in the vicinity of the Solar System.

  Starquin raged.

  It became the Purpose of the Dedos to influence events on Earth toward the eventual removal of the Hate Bombs and the release of Starquin, the great Five-in-One.

  Scanning the Ifalong, the Dedos saw a way to accomplish this. It was a tenuous thread of events stretching into the distant future that depended on the coming together of three people, who would thereafter be celebrated in The Song of Earth as the Triad.

  One of those people was Manuel.

  Another was an old Cuidador named Zozula.

  And the third was a girl with many names, and no name.

  The Coming of the Mole

  He cannot hear, he cannot see, he cannot speak his name. His mind is filled with greatness but his heart is filled with pain.

  —The Song of Earth

  Zozula didn’t know that he was destined to become a household name in millennia to come. Although he’d never heard of the Girl-withno-Name, he would shortly see her—but without realizing her significance. And he would have been horrified to think that his name would become linked with one Manuel, a barrel-chested young Wild Human who was at that moment walking along the beach ten kilometers away, lamenting the loss of his love.

  Because Zozula esteemed himself a True Human, one of the last survivors of the First Variety of the Second Species.

  He stood on his lofty viewpoint on the catwalk that girdled the lower part of the Dome. The upper part was curved into the
clouds like the arch of the sky itself. From here he could see Pu’este in the distance, an untidy clutter of huts with a pathetic little church standing on top of a knoll.

  It was no better than one would expect from Wild Humans, who worshipped strange gods. Zozula smiled to himself. He liked to step outside the Dome occasionally and look down and see the curious unsanitary way in which the rest of the world lived. There had been a storm, and the villagers would be repairing their roofs. Nearby, a figure trudged toward the Dome, wheeling something in a barrow.

  They were so vulnerable down there, the Wild Humans. So much at the mercy of the sun, the wind, the atmosphere, predators, disease...

  “Hello! You up there!” The man with the wheelbarrow had halted at the base of the ladder and was staring up at him. He was a Wild Human, of course, but dressed in a colorful robe unlike the rags that his kind usually affected.

  Zozula was about to ask him sharply what his business was, when something familiar about the newcomer made him pause. “Haven’t I seen you before?” he called down.

  “My name is Lord Shout,” said the man simply.

  And with a certain pride, which made Zozula smile to himself. How could a Wild Human rise to this kind of eminence? By ruling other Wild Humans, presumably. He noticed the heavy body of the other, the telltale undershot jaw, the abundant facial hair.

  And twenty years rolled back...

  Lord Shout had arrived one day on some kind of quest or mission—one of those peculiar rites with which Wild Human culture was infested—and had climbed to the catwalk around the Dome. In the course of this, he had come across a transparent area in the Dome’s surface and had looked in.

  He would never forget what he saw.

  It was terrible in its unexpectedness. He saw thousands upon thousands of humans lying unconscious on white benches, tiered above each other and below. He could not see the bottom tier or the top; they stretched farther than the eye could discern, all bathed in a blue light, all the bodies tapped with pale tubing. It was eerie, it was unearthly, it was immense. But one thing made it more macabre, more pitiful.

  All the people were big babies.

  Not small, normal babies, such as the mothers in Lord Shout’s tribe might coo over, but big babies, the size of men and women. Chubby and naked and huge, plump-cheeked and round-eyed and button-nosed—but as tall as Lord Shout and probably heavier. They lay pink and quiet on their benches, and Lord Shout groaned to himself as though he felt some comment was needed. He’d known the Dome from a distance all his life. It had been part of his existence, towering from the plain, solid and permanent. And now it suddenly revealed that—all this time—it had been harboring something coldly terrifying.

  Zozula had found Lord Shout crying.

  “How did it happen?” Lord Shout had asked. “In God’s name, how did they get like that?”

  Zozula had been touched by the sight of this strong, hirsute creature so shocked, and had explained to him in some detail the tragedy of the Dome, as told to him by the Rainbow.

  “It all started a long time ago, in the fifty-fourth century Cyclic, as I understand it...”

  That was almost 90,000 years ago. The Consumer Wars were over and Anticonsumerism had won. Shortage of fossil fuels and the high cost of travel resulted in increased use of self-contained recreational centers. At the same time there was a growing demand for visual rather than physical entertainment, accelerated by the decreased oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere as the oceans’ oxygen-producing creatures dwindled. The first Domes were built in the mid 56s, the later, solar-powered models in the late 57s.

  During the Great Retreat and the subsequent Nine Thousand Years’ Ice Age, the Domes were probably responsible for the survival of the human race.

  But then came the creeping onset of neoteny, the failure of the breeding programs and the vicarious consolation of Dream Earth, where the neotenites lived imaginary lives in a corner of the Rainbow.

  “Can’t you do anything about it?” Lord Shout had asked.

  “We’re trying, believe me,” said Zozula “We have a full-scale research program on another planet. The only trouble is that the neoteny factor, which is responsible for their appearance, can’t be eliminated. It seems to be a dominant gene present in all samples in our tissue bank—even in my own tissues, we’ve found. I’m lucky to be built the way I am. My own body is the last of its line. And like all the other Keepers in there, I’m dying slowly. We practice our Inner Think, of course. But we can’t live forever. And when we’ve gone—the present generation of Keepers, that is—there will be nobody else. No True Humans to take our place. I don’t know what we’ll do. I suppose we’ll have to recruit the neotenites, but they’re terribly weak and susceptible to disease.”

  A lot of this had gone over Lord Shout’s head. “Why not let all those poor monsters die? What’s the point of it all? What’s so important about the Dome, and True Humans? It’s only you that call yourselves True Humans. Personally, I’m quite happy with my own body. At least I can withstand the climate without getting out of breath. Shouldn’t that be the measure of a True Human?” His shock and sorrow were turning slowly to outrage.

  “We have a duty to those creatures in there. We’ve failed them often enough already. Now we must keep them alive until we can breed True Human hosts for their minds. There are ten thousand of them in there, all living their thinking lives in the Rainbow, waiting for us to find them bodies. Would you want to be responsible for wiping out all those minds?”

  Lord Shout was becoming furious.

  “God damn you,” he said. “If there is a God—and I still believe there is, in spite of what I’ve just seen—may he twist your body into a monster and feed your brains into a computer.” He spoke very formally, as though uttering a sacred curse.

  Zozula couldn’t remember his own reply. Whatever it was, it had been inadequate and hadn’t satisfied Lord Shout or himself. As if offering some kind of excuse, he’d taken Lord Shout into the Dome and shown him Dream Earth, the imaginary world where the neotenites exercised their minds in environments of their own invention, among phantom forests and meadows, cities and seas. Lord Shout had remained unconvinced.

  Zozula had been very thoughtful for many months after that meeting, and the other Keepers, or Cuidadors, had noticed and commented, but he’d kept his own counsel. He was the head Cuidador, hardly an appropriate person to start voicing doubts about their mission in life.

  And now, twenty years later, here was Lord Shout again...

  But changed. The pride was there and he tried to meet Zozula’s gaze levelly, but his eyes were haunted.

  “It’s been a long time, Zozula,” he said quietly.

  “Time to think. Time to come to terms.”

  “For me or for you?”

  “I’ve never forgotten what you said. And I’ve never been able to decide whether you were right or wrong.”

  And Lord Shout said, “I was wrong.”

  Zozula stared at him. “How can you say that? You believed what you said. Any Wild Human capable of thought would have said what you did. I’ve spent nearly twenty years knowing you may well be right, and telling nobody. You spoke as you saw it, as an independent man—and I respected you for it.”

  “Please don’t respect me any more, Zozula. All that was twenty years ago. I don’t need respect, now. I need pity. Are you human enough to grant it to me?”

  Zozula descended the ladder. The barrow stood there, crude and wooden, Wild Human–made. In the barrow lay a creature.

  There was a long silence.

  Eventually Lord Shout said, “My son, the Mole... You can see he’s not normal. He’s been deaf and blind since birth, and...”

  “Even if we could treat his physical abnormalities,” Zozula said gently, “our Cuidador code doesn’t allow us to practice medicine on Wild Humans. We have a duty to the species as a whole, and we’ve already paid a price for interfering with the course of nature. You people out here—you repres
ent a hope for Humanity. Natural selection must be allowed to take its course.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask for treatment.”

  “What, then?”

  “Mole, here... He’s known nothing. Can you imagine what that’s like? He’s never seen a tree, or a wave on the beach. He’s never heard the jaguar roar, and he’s never seen its beauty. He’s never even held a conversation with another human. He’s fifteen years old, and he’s never seen a woman...”

  “I’m truly sorry, but I don’t see what we can do.”

  “I want you to take him in. I want you to treat him like the rest of those... neotenites you have in there. Lay him down on a shelf and plug him in and let him dream real dreams in the computer. That’s the only way he’ll ever know what the world is like.”

  “The neotenites have been dreaming for thousands of years. The world they’ve created in Dream Earth is nothing like the world we know. The Mole would find it frightening and I’m afraid the images would drive him mad.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  “I’m sorry. We’re full to capacity, you understand? In order to accommodate the Mole, we’d have to eliminate a neotenite’s body, which automatically means eliminating his mind. You must see why we couldn’t do that.”

  “But you told me you have ten thousand bodies in there. What difference can one more make? You could make up a spare bed, surely?”

  Zozula said, “We could if we knew how. But we don’t. We simply don’t have the knowledge to fabricate the bed, the life-support terminals and so on. I’m sorry.” Then, seeing the expression on Lord Shout’s face, Zozula took pity and said, “But we can do our best for him.”

  “Anything.”

  “Does he talk?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, what kind of things does he think about? He’s deaf too, you said? What’s happening in his mind?”