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The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

Page 12

by Coney, Michael G.


  Hopho shouted and scooped at the water with cupped hands, trying to draw the boat nearer.

  The crocodile nipped the transom, teeth like pincers, nostrils cavernous behind the baby’s head. Hopho dredged a rock from under the water and threw it. He was unused to physical coordination, and the rock hit the surface an arm’s length before him, splashing water into his face.

  When he opened his eyes, boat and baby were gone...

  Scenes like this happened annually between the years 143,306 and 143,624 Cyclic, throughout the short life of this great and imaginary civilization. It is of little importance in the sweep of history, although it remains forever the guilty secret of many generations of Cuidadors in Dome Azul.

  Because the Cuidadors destroyed the civilization of the delta, unwittingly.

  When the delta civilization is mentioned in present-day singings—which is not often—its people are referred to in the masculine gender. This is for convenience only, because in fact they had no sex. They did not carry the seeds of the Inner Think, either. And they were sickly; they lived, on average, a mere forty years.

  The very existence of the tribe depended on their rescuing from the crocodiles each year a number of babies greater than the number of people who had died. Some years they succeeded; other years they failed. Sometimes older people had to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of a baby.

  Sometimes the baby was not worth it.

  Hopho was thirty years old and brilliant beyond measure. When he saw a baby approaching in a kayak he knew it was probably destined to be less intelligent than he. However, he also knew that he probably had only ten years left to contribute to the imaginative gestalt of the civilization.

  He ran awkwardly upriver. Lergs was also wading toward the kayak, and Hopho sensed that Lergs’s chances of survival were poor. Lergs reached for the little boat with a fat arm. The water swirled nearby.

  “Lergs!”

  Hopho dragged the kayak ashore. The baby looked up at him with clear blue eyes and smiled. Hopho seized Lergs’s arm and felt the whole body jerk spasmodically as the crocodile tore at some underwater part. Hopho pulled, feet sinking into the ooze, and suddenly Lergs slid free. Hopho dragged him into the shallows.

  Lergs was terribly light, and he trailed a cloud of red.

  “Let me go, Hopho.”

  “We’ll fix you up. Eloise is good with wounds.”

  “No. Push me out. It’s better.”

  “I need you for the gestalt, Lergs!”

  Lergs smiled, a quick baring of teeth. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you lie, Hopho. Face the truth, friend, you’d do much better with someone young. Someone like Trevis. I’m just a muddled philosopher, but Trevis has a clear mind. He can trace the movement of galaxies for a million years into the Ifalong. With his talent, you’ll have what you want. You already have all the reasoning power in the rest of the team, and all the knowledge. Trevis has an instinctive grip of the Ifalong. With him in your team, there’s nothing you can’t do!”

  Now Hopho spoke aloud, using a brief sentence culled from the grunts of the Wild Humans.

  “I love you, Lergs, my friend,” he said.

  It was a primitive statement, like death, and when the crocodile pushed its snout out of the water and took what was left of Lergs, Hopho did not object.

  The little boats came on, borne on the snaking currents of the big river that in the Ifalong would be dead and dry and blowing sand. Only the crocodiles would survive, moving on elsewhere—timeless, perfect creatures.

  The little boats were fewer now, and more crudely constructed. Only the occasional one rounded the bend. Upstream, the great river was smooth, its waters almost empty of human life. Some boats had floated out to sea and their occupants would soon die. Most had been destroyed by the crocodiles, and the green waters were strewn with wreckage. A few had been gathered in by the people of the delta and the babies were being fussed over and wrapped in coarse cloth. Traditional food was being prepared from the pounded root of the hierba lechera.

  In the year 143,299 Cyclic, a Wild Human named Dolores had made the mistake of thinking such a baby was one of her own species. She’d taken it from the water, wondering, and carried it to her village. It had been seven years before she realized her mistake, and her tribe had forced her to take the child back to the riverbank and leave it there. The child had been the first member of the delta civilization and, the following year, had retrieved two little boats from the crocodiles...

  Now the delta people prepared for the year to come.

  They caught and dried fish and they sowed seed. They rigged primitive shelters for the babies and the people who were going to look after them. They discussed their projects and decided on the most suitable gestalt teams.

  They decided Hopho’s project held the most promise for new discoveries. Antilla, Buth and Stril were going to join him again. Trevis volunteered to replace Lergs.

  “No!” said Yato, who worked alone.

  “Why not?” Hopho respected Yato. They all did. He was a brilliant abstract historian. In the course of his lifetime, and without building on the work of any predecessor, he had traced the flow of human existence up to the present day. Working by intellect alone, he had seen the Beginning, visualized the emergence of life on Earth, evolution, diverging happentracks, wars, ice ages, everything...

  For instance, Yato had informed the tribe that the Dome, a great mound in the distance, was probably full of sleeping humans living vicarious lives in the circuits of a giant computer.

  “Technology would always outpace the ability of the mass of people to adapt to it,” he explained. “And at the same time, increased leisure would encourage the development of sedentary pursuits. Finally, people wouldn’t be able to face the real world—the crowding, the pressures, the foul atmosphere, the hopelessness and pointlessness of death—so they would build a safe place where they could dream forever. And to help them dream, they would build a vast storehouse of knowledge with almost infinite reasoning capacity, a composite of all the smaller computers they’d built over the ages.”

  Now Trevis picked up the thread of that explanation—and Trevis was a futurian. He began to project Yato’s theories and to evaluate all the happen-tracks of the nearby Ifalong.

  “If I join your group, Hopho, the tribe is doomed. We will have the capacity to gain total knowledge of the Galaxy from the beginning to the end of Time. So we will be destroyed, because someone more powerful than us will want it that way.”

  “What could be more powerful than us, if we have total knowledge?”

  “Brute force will always defeat knowledge, Hopho.”

  “With what motive?”

  And now Trevis smiled. “It’s a very old motive and it has no meaning to us. But for what it’s worth, I’ll vocalize the way the Wild Humans say it: jealousy.”

  “We cannot stem the flood tide,” Hopho quoted an old tribal saying to hide his unease, “but at least we can move into another dimension.”

  “Not this time. We’re going to be hit in our most vulnerable spot. Shall we cuerp?”

  So they lay down together: Hopho, Trevis, Antilla, Buth and Stril, and they allowed their minds to wash over one another. Together they climbed out of their earthly environment, using Moloquit’s simple astral escalator. Moloquit had died a long time previously, but they had retained his most powerful images. Soon they arrived at a stage that Hopho could only describe as the right place, although it was not a place in any normal meaning of the word. They picked up the threads of their last great works, and their thoughts were like an infinite spider’s web glittering with the dew of ideas. Knowledge flowed like electricity; theories were formed, accepted, proved, built upon. It was an ecstasy of learning and there was no limit to it. There was nothing they could not know. Yato’s seeds bloomed and all the past was catalogued. Finally, Trevis’s new images began to flow into the gestalt. It was as though he were saying:

  “We know the rules and we know how it
was Now let’s discover how it will be.”

  And another year went by.

  The First Quest of the Triad

  Through swamp and steaming jungle to the delta in the north,

  Three people reached the Astral Builders, where they found a fourth.

  —Song of Earth

  Zozula said, “I thought the Mole might help us put the Rainbow right, but it didn’t work out. Now, the other day I saw something strange in the Rainbow: a city inhabited by True Humans, in the delta. At first I thought I was scanning an ancient memory bank, but the Rainbow said it was the present day. There were land vehicles and starships and pink towers—all kinds of wonderful things. It was a very advanced technology. We must visit those people and enlist their help in putting the Rainbow right, before the whole Dome is destroyed.” “There’s no city in the delta,” said Manuel. “Have you ever been to the delta?” “Well, no. But Hasqual has. He’s traveled all over the world. If there were a city in the delta, he’d have told us. All there is, is swamp and jungle and crocodiles, and a few tribes of hunting people. Life is hard in the jungle.” He regarded Zozula critically. “I can’t imagine True Humans wanting to live there.”

  The Girl said, “You never know. I’ve known jungles to cover whole worlds. It’s easy to miss something.”

  “Quite right, Girl. It’s worth investigating, anyway. Your Belinda had the appearance of a True Human, Manuel. She had to come from somewhere. We must explore every possibility,” said Zozula cunningly.

  It was morning and they sat in the ground-level of the Dome. These were the Transitional Quarters that millennia ago were used to house visitors from Outside whom the Dome inhabitants did not quite trust because of their unpredictable nature or their unusual diseases. In these cases, communication between the inhabitants and the newcomers was by visiphone and all elevator shafts were sealed off. Whole communities had grown up in the Transitional Quarters from time to time, had endured for a century or so and then died out or moved on. And the robots, cleaning cavies and washdogs had been sent in to remove the traces of their existence.

  For the last couple of hundred years Zozula had maintained a stable of shrugleggers and vampiros in the quarters for use on his occasional forays Outside.

  Manuel bit into a slab of food, which, if he had known its constituents, he would never have allowed near his mouth. But the principles of the Dome’s recycling system were mercifully unknown to him. The sticky confection tasted good and the prospect of action began to appeal. “All right,” he said. “We have to start looking somewhere.”

  The Girl said uneasily, “It’s not far, is it?”

  “We will ride shrugleggers,” said Zozula and left them for a moment, to return with three shambling beasts the like of which Manuel had never seen and the Girl had certainly never dreamed of.

  “What are they?” she asked. “They don’t... bite, do they?” She was learning to anticipate pain.

  “They’re harmless animals, bred many years ago in much the same way as the Specialists were bred. I believe there are bear genes in their make-up.”

  Zozula was wrong, of course. The shrugleggers were discovered on Ilos III in the year 83,426 Cyclic. Armless bipeds with gigantic thighs, they foraged in the ooze of swamps and were brought back to Earth for use as beasts of burden in remote areas during a period when human philosophy was influenced by the Kikihuahua Examples.

  Zozula strapped harnesses onto the creatures, providing seats high on their backs. “Come on, Girl. Manuel and I will help you up.”

  A short while later they rode out into the morning sun, the shrugleggers striding steadily north, following the course of the stream that carried away the run-off from the Dome. Behind Zozula, jerking irritably at the rope fastened around its neck, a vampiro hopped and scuttled, trying to keep up.

  No humans saw the departure of the Triad on their first quest. Only a scattering of guanacos, munching thoughtfully, raised their heads and watched them go by with expressions of supercilious disinterest. It was a quiet, warm morning and the delta forest could be seen as a smudge of green beyond the broad brown plain. Behind them, trails of smoke from the cooking fires of Pu’este rose vertically in the still air.

  Above, wispy elongated clouds moved slowly eastward, out to sea. Manuel glanced at them unhappily, but said nothing. Presumably Zozula knew what he was doing.

  By late afternoon Manuel was not so sure. The arid grassland was behind them and they were entering a transitional region of fleshy scrub and a few tall trees, and it was clear that their present rate of progress would bring them to the forest proper by nightfall. The sun hung low over the mountains to the west.

  Finally Manuel called, “We have to stop!”

  Zozula glanced around irritably but made no attempt to check the stride of his shruglegger.

  Losing patience, Manuel shouted, “If you want to die, I don’t!” and brought his shruglegger to a choking halt by throwing his forearm around its neck and pulling back. He slid to the ground.

  Stopping his beast, too, Zozula looked down at Manuel. “What do you mean, die? Are you suggesting there’s danger ahead?”

  “There’s always danger in the dark. We have to camp here and now, because if we go any further it’ll be too late to light a fire. And I’m not going to be caught in the open without one.” As he spoke he was tugging up clumps of dry grass and piling them in a heap. Then he squatted down and, cocking an eye at the sun, began to focus the rays of his hemitrex—the hard shell of a jellyfish evolved to deflect harmful rays—and direct a cone of light onto the tinder. A wisp of smoke rose.

  Zozula conceded defeat, scrambled from his shruglegger and helped the Girl down. Manuel began to cook strips of dried iguana on sticks that he pushed into the ground and set at an angle, while the Girl watched this demonstration of competence with some awe.

  “I wouldn’t know how to do it,” she said. Even the wind on her face felt strange.

  “You’ll learn,” said Manuel. Seeing Zozula was out of earshot, untying the vampiro, he added quietly, “I hope Zozula learns, too. All this is about as queer to him as it is to you, but he won’t admit it. There is danger, you know. Real danger. We have to take precautions.”

  She said, “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Here, take these sticks and cook yourself something to eat.”

  Zozula arrived, leading the vampiro, which was blinking at the fire unhappily. “Now, then,” he said briskly, “we’ll just set up the vampiro and we’ll be all ready for the night. Oh—and you don’t have to eat that stuff, Girl. I have plenty of real food here.” He reached into a bag under the vampiro’s chin and produced squares of confectionery. The Girl, who had already gagged over a shred of half-raw iguana, took a piece gratefully.

  “I’ll get used to your kind of food before long, Manuel,” she said. “I really will.”

  Manuel grunted, munching with noisy appreciation at his meat. Then he stood in some alarm as Zozula clapped his hands with a sharp report.

  “Stand back,” said the Keeper imperiously, “while I set up the vampiro.” He gestured to the animal, which didn’t move. Shouting an unintelligible command, he clapped his hands again.

  Slowly, reluctantly, the vampiro began to open its huge, membranous wings.

  The vampiro had been created at the Mordecai N. Whirst Institute many thousands of years ago as a traveling companion for members of various cults who, partly under the influence of the kikihuahua teachings, preferred an open-air life. The vampiros were basically huge bats that provided shelter and could be used as a light pack animal. When given the appropriate command, the vampiro would spread its huge wings, curving them around its body to form a tent that could sleep four humans.

  If this operation is to be performed successfully, it is important that the vampiro’s wings should not touch the blazing sticks of a roaring fire.

  Screeching and trailing smoke, the vampiro reared up and began to flap wildly, fanning sparks and embers into the faces
of the Triad. With an oath, Zozula threw himself at the beast.

  “Help me, Manuel!” he shouted. “The bastard’s trying to take off!”

  Before the youth could move, however, the vampiro wrapped its wings protectively around itself, nursing its pain—and incidentally nursing Zozula, who found himself smothered in a leathery embrace. Manuel hesitated, torn between the need to help the Cuidador, whose face was turning purple, and the need to laugh. The Girl had no such dilemma. With no real appreciation of danger, she was almost crying with delight. This was much better than Dream Earth. The vampiro stood rigidly erect, clutching Zozula to its breast, so that only his long nose and furious eyes could be seen above the cloak of the creature’s wings. His muffled shouting ceased and his eyes began to bulge as the vampiro’s fingerbones tightened like steel bands across his chest.

  Manuel seized a brand from the fire and waved it in front of the vampiro’s eyes. It stumbled backward, releasing Zozula, who fell to the ground, coughing weakly.

  “The vampiro is not accustomed to fires,” he muttered. “You should have realized that. He’s spent most of his life in the Dome. You scared him out of his wits.”

  Manuel hung his head. “We need the fire,” he said.

  Zozula, recovering, began to bustle about, shepherding the vampiro to a safe distance from the flames, tethering the shrugleggers, who had been watching events with some alarm, taking an inventory of their meager food supply, and all the while stumbling over roots and bushes and cursing, being unused to walking on anything other than a smooth floor.

  They spent the early hours of the night under the tent of the vampiro’s wings, but shortly after midnight the fire collapsed and the wind carried a drift of sparks toward the creature. Panic-stricken, it folded its wings about itself and shuffled rapidly away into the bush.

  In the morning they awoke stiff with cold. A dank mist was rising from the river, and the sun, low in the east, was obscured by high, trailing cloud. Manuel shivered. Beside him the Girl stirred, wheezing. The fire had burned out and they couldn’t light another until the sun emerged. Manuel sat up. A half-memory came to him and he looked at the river thoughtfully.

 

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