The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  In the Rainbow, however, reposes the truth of one particular happentrack. And on this happentrack there was no joyous clasping of hands, no sense of the fulfillment to come, no premonitions of glory.

  What really happened was that Manuel arrived in the middle of an argument. The other two were hardly aware of his presence. Zozula looked a little sheepish and the Girl looked—well... grotesque. The sight of her caused Manuel to hesitate and to swallow unexpectedly, so that he almost retched.

  She was sitting beside the pool like a sun-softened sack of lard, weeping.

  “What kind of monster have you turned me into? I was beautiful, and it cost me a whole Bigwish. I was a Marilyn! And now you’ve spoiled it all. I’ll be stuck with this body for years, now!”

  Manuel looked around, seeking something to divert her, but the evening landscape was bleak, the scanty wind-blown scrub like drowning fingers in a dusty sea, the wind suddenly chill, the axolotl pool dark and foreboding and the little creatures themselves moving below the surface like pale shadows of corruption.

  He placed the Simulator on the ground. “I have something to show you,” he said tentatively. “This is going to make you feel better. It’s called ‘love.’”

  Zozula gave him an impatient glance, then turned to the Girl again. “You remember Eulalie, the goddess who contacted you? She was my wife. She was dying, and we needed you to take her place. She put all the knowledge of the Dream Earth technology into your head.”

  But the Girl wasn’t interested in that. “How can you say this is my real body? I know what I really look like. I spent years as Myself. I wasn’t all that pretty, but I liked Myself. That was the real me. But this body is some kind of a freak. In all the Bigwishes people have ever had, I’m sure they never thought up anything so repulsive as this. You must be sick, really sick.”

  Zozula tried to explain. “Yourself isn’t really yourself, if you know what I mean. Yourself is what you might have looked like on a different happentrack, where neoteny hadn’t happened to people. Yourself is a white lie the Rainbow tells, to make everything seem a little more real. Living there in the Rainbow, able to do whatever they like, people can lose all pride. So the Rainbow tells them this one little lie: That people—real people—still look the way they used to millennia ago.”

  “Well, what about him?” The Girl pointed at Manuel. “He doesn’t look so bad to me!”

  “He’s just a Wild Human.”

  “Well, make me into a Wild Human, then, if you’ve run out of your own type of body.”

  “Wild Humans are not suitable hosts.” As Zozula spoke to the Girl he gave Manuel a furious look and jerked his head in a gesture of dismissal. Matters were difficult enough without this youth hanging around. “You wouldn’t understand the details.”

  “Try us,” said Manuel.

  Now Zozula gave the boy his full attention. “Just who in hell are you?”

  “Manuel,” said Manuel. There was little else he could say.

  But the effect of the name on Zozula was surprising. His anger faded, as a curious recollection touched his mind for a moment and was gone. Manuel? “It’s a common enough name,” he said. Then it came to him: a recent dream, and a woman in black saying, “Zozula, you have been chosen. You, she, and a young man named Manuel will form the Triad. Look after the others, and always remember Shenshi, for I have some vanity, too.”

  He regarded the boy in sudden interest. “Why did you come here?”

  “Perhaps to learn,” said Manuel. “Look!” He pointed suddenly upward, so imperiously that they followed his gaze...

  The slow curvature of the Dome was visible as a black mass against the deepening gloom of the coming night, and the stars were appearing around its rim. The Dome was huge, pressing down on them, with no clouds to conceal its immensity. No lights showed; the dust of aeons had blanketed the ports. Yet something was happening up there, far away in the sky near the horizon of the black arc. Just for an instant a faint halo glowed. Then there was a flash that was more than simple light...

  And the three of them, down beside the axolotl pool, saw in their minds something that their eyes couldn’t possibly have registered. The Girl gasped and Manuel smiled, and Zozula grappled to retain the image of flashing steel and whirling wheels with heavy spokes, pumping rods and a core of great heat, and two men... Then it was gone, and they were left with only the power of it.

  “The worst thing...” the Girl said softly, “the thing you do when there is nothing else to keep your humanity alive. Some of us call it the Celestial Steam Locomotive. You ride it when you’ve tried everything else.”

  “Will you explain it, please?” Manuel asked Zozula.

  Zozula looked at him for a long time, and in the end saw something that satisfied him. Slowly, knowing very well he was offering an excuse and not an explanation, he spoke.

  “A long time ago Mankind reached the stage where only a select few people could understand enough to keep up with technological advances. And as time went by, fewer still built upon the work of those few, and then just a handful, the most brilliant minds on Earth. Then maybe a couple, dreaming incredible dreams, directing work that only the Rainbow could understand. They built on the work of generations of others, and they died. That was the end of it. Humanity was surrounded by machines that ran themselves—though how, and what some of them did, nobody knows. Other machines helped them. Maybe the Rainbow knows all the answers. But we don’t even know what questions to ask, or how to ask them. So I’m not ashamed of admitting that I can’t explain the existence of the Celestial Steam Locomotive. I have to put up a front, though. It can be terrifying for the Keepers when their own leader admits he doesn’t know what’s going on...”

  The Girl said, “I’ve always known exactly what was going on, because I made it happen, more or less. So this is the real world? Well, I don’t like it. Take me back to my own world, please.”

  “Let me show you something,” said Manuel once again, and he activated the Simulator.

  “Just another machine.” Zozula watched the lights begin to glow. “I’ve seen these before.”

  The images began to form before the Simulator, brighter than usual, because of the darkness around. A pale mist, glowing on the faces of the watchers and plating the axolotl pool with silver. The little water dolls, disturbed, rose to the surface and watched, too.

  “The storm, you see...” The clouds were there, building up, and below them the tossing waves; and below that again, huge and graceful shapes that puzzled Manuel because he hadn’t put them in the picture himself. Were these shapes some residue of Belinda herself? Something from her mind that had slipped into the picture while he was composing it? They swam in formation, the whales, and there was something organized and purposeful about their movements. Then they were gone and the clouds were suggesting the flying hair of a girl swimming, dancing underwater. Manuel had composed all this. He remembered. He was trembling and his palms were moist.

  “Remarkable...” Zozula was leaning forward.

  The Girl was silent. She’d never seen anything like this before. She’d never imagined such a thing as abstract art could exist. Where she came from, people were practical. They wanted something? They got it. They were bored with something? They threw it away. Art? It had no place in the relentless pursuit of pleasure. It was too slow, too introspective, too passive. Yet this performance by the barrel-shaped boy’s machine was oddly fascinating. In some way it made her think of a childhood she’d never had.

  Manuel said apologetically, “I was told it didn’t have enough love. But I think it has more, now.”

  Zozula said quietly, “It has love.” It seemed Eulalie was very close to him again.

  And now Belinda was there, dancing before the little group, dancing in the dark like a glowing naiad—not like a girl would dance in the flesh, so you could see her elbows and her knees and her pores, but dancing in the minds of the watchers. An axolotl would not have recognized any human figure in those
images, but the humans did. For them, the clouds spelled love.

  The Girl was crying, sobbing quietly as she watched, blinking because she didn’t want to miss anything.

  The mists, deepening their rainbow colors, gave one final message of hope and courage and loss, and faded away. Manuel switched the machine off.

  Zozula was talking softly, almost to himself. “... but there is no hope, is there? The Dome is dying. Everything’s dying, slowly. What’s the use of love, now? Love died early in the game.” His gaze was turned inward and he’d forgotten he was a Cuidador in the presence of two lesser mortals. Then he blinked and looked at Manuel—and now he saw him. Something passed between them. He said, “Forgive me, boy. My wife just died.”

  Manuel said, “I’m sorry. I just lost somebody too.”

  After a pause, Zozula asked, “The storm-girl?”

  “Yes.”

  And because Zozula and the Girl seemed receptive, Manuel told them the story of Belinda.

  Afterward Zozula said, “I kept almost seeing her in your mind-painting, and then she was gone again. Why couldn’t you have made her a little more clear?”

  “I know how she looks. I’ll never forget that. I wanted to show how she made me feel.”

  “Was she a Wild Human?”

  “She was not from the village. Neither was she from the Dome. She never told me where she came from. I was afraid to ask too many questions, because...” He hesitated. “I don’t like being laughed at.”

  “We won’t laugh. Go on.”

  “I didn’t want to pin her down. She never seemed quite real. I think I was frightened that if I really tried to identify her, I’d find she didn’t exist. She was full of life at first, and she made me laugh a lot. She only had a few rags of clothes, and they were mostly skins. Later she became quiet and she seemed to get very weak. She was very thin and breathless...”

  “Thin? Like me, you mean?”

  Manuel laughed. “She was much prettier than you, Zozula.”

  For a while now, an excitement had been growing in Zozula that he could barely suppress. Now he speculated aloud. “A slim human, breathless in an atmosphere that a Wild Human can easily withstand... Where could she come from? Is there really some kind of city in the delta jungle? She could have drifted down the coast from there, in a boat. They’re out there somewhere, the True Humans. They must be.”

  “I’m tired,” the Girl said suddenly. “Can we go back now?”

  Zozula said, “We’re not going back to the way we were. Not yet. There are more important things on Earth than creating special effects for a lot of selfish zombies. I’ve lived all my life in and around this Dome, did you know that? And suddenly I’m beginning to realize I haven’t been doing my job properly. I’ve visited the village twice and communicated with people in other Domes. But I have to admit that I know nothing about the world. That’s a sobering admission for a man who’s been top god for longer than I care to remember. So now, I’d like to find out what’s going on out here. I’m going to ask some very small questions. Ones that I’ll understand the answers to. Then maybe I’ll be worthy of my job and able to solve some of the problems we have in there.”

  “Take me back first,” said the Girl anxiously.

  “No. You’re coming along. There’s hope for you, Girl—you were crying at Manuel’s pictures. You come with me, and perhaps we’ll find you a proper body.”

  Manuel picked up the Simulator.

  “And you too, Manuel. The three of us—we each have something I haven’t seen in anyone for a long time, except for my wife—she had it. But maybe we’re the only three left. Let’s stick together for a while.”

  So that was it. Nothing dramatic, no thunderbolts from Starquin, no sudden materialization of Dedos, no mysterious writings on rocks. This account of the formation of the Triad may not be as dramatic, as flamboyant as some, but it has the ring of truth. Let’s stick together for a while. Very probable words, when spoken by a man who needs company and love, when spoken to two young people who have demonstrated that they can help fill his need.

  Here Ends that Part of

  The Song of Earth Known

  to Men as The Creation

  of the Triad

  Our Tale Continues with

  the Group Of Stories and

  Legends Known as In the

  Land of Lost Dreams

  where the Triad meets many strange creatures

  and, in so doing

  learn their own faults,

  return to the real world

  and prepare to meet their destiny

  The Astral Builders

  There was a river that flowed from the mountains behind Pu’este to the cool waters of the old South Atlantic. It is gone now. The jungle has turned to desert and the drifting sand has obliterated the watercourse, but in the 143rd millennium it carried green glacial run-off through the hills, passing several kilometers north of the stupendous structure of Dome Azul, through the coastal rain forest to a flat delta. Here in this delta lived the greatest and smallest civilization that Earth has ever known.

  Their minarets rose from the ground into the clouds. Their machines hummed quietly in vast underground chambers. Their vehicles glided without wheels, without sound, along broad avenues lined with trees that grew nowhere else on Earth—indeed, nowhere else in the whole of the Greataway. They sent their ships around the Galaxy and they saw creatures that no man or alien had ever seen before.

  They were sterile.

  Consequently, they poured into their art everything that another race might have poured into procreation. Their paintings were breathtaking, their songs would make people weep. Their statuary was dancing stone, and their poems spoke of emotions that ordinary humans had never known but that to these people were as real as the trees and the crocodiles.

  And all this within a delta island no more than a kilometer across. No human outside the delta ever saw this wonderful civilization, except for a brief glimpse afforded to a Cuidador named Zozula, by way of the Rainbow. And when it died, it left no remains other than a whisper that became a legend.

  The river flowed swiftly on two sides of the triangular island; on the third side lay the ocean. The river water was cold. This, and the crocodiles, discouraged the people from leaving the island, where they grew a few simple crops and fished when the mood took them, meanwhile creating, creating. The river flowed brown for most of the year, having picked up silt and broken vegetation during its journey through the rain forest.

  But once a year it flowed clear and green, and carried to the delta a flotilla of tiny boats carved from balsa: model galleons, frigates and dhows.

  And in each boat lay a human baby, crying and waving tiny fists at the sky.

  Hopho soared in the clouds. He had linked the minds of Antilla and Buth, Lergs and Stril, and added a couple of ideas from Sintel, and fashioned the whole into an intricate composite that would solve all the mysteries of the world—once he had found the means to turn that last key...

  “Hopho!”

  The cry cut through his dreaming. In his agitation he lost control of a billion carefully constructed memory banks, which promptly dissolved back into the ether.

  “Hopho!”

  It was a real cry, a shout made by physical waves, and it shocked him. He slammed the door on his vast imaginary computer, commanding it to stay intact until he got back. He ran down the marble staircase, dreamed up by Fabel, into Eloise’s time-city, leaped into a transporter imagined by Awa, flitted through Trippata’s hyperspace to the terminal of Su.

  He dismounted. An invisible hand was shaking his shoulder. He went through the ritual of decuerping. This was his own invention—a rapid way to return to the physical world.

  “Hopho!”

  The sense of touch returned and he felt a coolness against his back. He felt the hand as well as the shaking; it was warm. He heard the voice again: “Hopho, decuerp!” and he smelled the stink of the jungle. His mouth tasted sour. He opened h
is eyes. He was back in the physical world. The jungle cried. He heard it, tasted it, smelled it, saw it, felt it with the five senses of discomfort. He wished he were back in the plenum. Physically, he rose to his feet and, physically, slopped through the mud to the riverbank.

  He saw the little boats. He lumbered down onto the beach, kicking at the dreamers recumbent on the mud, yelling, shaking them awake. Their eyes cleared and they began to climb to their feet. The shout was taken up by twenty voices.

  “Decuerp! Decuerp!” They moved slowly and painfully, handicapped by a genetic defect.

  The tiny boats drifted round the river bend in twos and threes—coracles, clinker dinghies, pinnaces. The thin cries of the babies came clearly across the water.

  The crocodiles came too. They rose from the banks and glided into the water. They closed on the small craft and crunched them in long jaws. They tossed the babies into the air and swallowed them whole. The tribe screamed in despair.

  Some of them struggled up the bank to outflank the brutes. Others waded out to create a diversion. The crocodiles cruised the deeper water, picking off the tiny boats as they rounded the bend, gobbling the living cargoes. The people wept and splashed. The boats were coming thick and fast now, twenty or more spread out across the river’s width. Some of them hit whirlpools and spun. Others, with tiny sails, reaped the wind and made sudden aimless darts to and fro. These were the ones that stood the best chance of survival.

  Hopho waded out to intercept a schooner. On a broad reach it sailed directly toward him, pursued by a crocodile with a fast rippling wake. Hopho could see the occupant: a plump baby wrapped in a scrap of cloth, face scarlet and puckered with crying. It lay with its head against the transom, legs on either side of the mainmast. It squealed and kicked, and its foot became entangled in the threads of the self-steering gear. The sails luffed. The little schooner came up into the wind and stopped.