The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “All right. All right.” All the stuffing had been knocked out of the dog. He stood shivering, tail between his wheels.

  “We leave at first light.” Zozula wedged himself down into a cleft of rock, dragging dried vegetation over himself.

  “Don’t do it...”

  “Don’t do what? Who said that? Was that you, Manuel?”

  “It was the Girl. She’s awake!”

  They knelt beside her and Manuel saw her eyes were open and glistening. Something about her expression made him shiver; there was a terrifying blankness there. Her lips moved.

  Manuel had to bend close to hear what she had to say.

  Don't do it—not that Train.

  You might fall under a spell

  Or into a bottomless well

  Eighty percent of the passengers purchased a ticket directly to Hell!

  “What did she say?” asked Zozula.

  “Nothing... Nothing that made sense. She’s rambling, Zozula. You’re right. We’ll have to get her back home.”

  It was suddenly cold, and Manuel covered the Girl with dead twigs and leaves. In the gathering darkness he could see that her eyes were still open, but he couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him.

  Zozula yawned, pulling his robe about him. “We don’t have to do anything right now,” he said. “A night’s sleep will do us all good. The Girl’s resting easily.”

  “She’s watching me, Zozula. Her eyes look different—not like her at all.”

  “Go to sleep, Manuel.” Zozula wriggled back into his cleft, pillowing his head on his hands and blinking at the stars.

  “All right.” Unhappily, Manuel composed himself.

  Soon they were both breathing slowly and evenly, and the dog, whimpering and twitching, was fleeing from dream enemies.

  The Girl got quietly to her feet and walked away. Her eyes were open, but they were not connected to her mind.

  The Five Fears

  Somewhere in a swamp in mystic crocodiles’ domain,

  Live Loneliness, Humiliation, Loss and Death and Pain.

  —The Song of Earth

  The Girl found she was wading through water-logged ground between trees, but after a while she felt firm ground beneath her feet. Although daylight had arrived, the canopy of leaves and thick, twisted branches was so dense that very little light filtered through. The leaves dripped a continuous rain, however. Worn out, the Girl fell to the ground.

  Later she awakened with a feeling that someone was watching her. She raised her head slowly. Had Zozula and Manuel arrived to take her back? The trees stood silently around. She turned her head sharply at a slight sound to the right and caught a glimpse of a slender naked form before it slipped behind a tree. The drizzle from above made it hard to see clearly, but just for a moment she’d thought... Did the creature have wings? A faunlike face appeared around the trunk, but was quickly withdrawn. The creature was frightened.

  “Come here!” the Girl called. “I won’t harm you.”

  The face popped out. The eyes were wide and scared.

  “Come on!”

  Now a leg appeared, slim and pale, tense and ready to jerk back. Then the body. One hand still held the trunk. It was a girl, a very beautiful young girl about thirteen physical years old. She hung onto the knotted trunk as though her hands and feet had different ideas. Then at last she let go and stood poised, slanting eyes darting anxious glances around before they regarded the Girl.

  “Are you sure you won’t hurt me? I couldn’t stand it if you did.”

  She had wings, gossamer things that looked too fragile to bear a kitten aloft, let alone a girl.

  “What... what are you?” asked the Girl wonderingly.

  “I’m a flaiad. I live here in the Forest of Fear. It’s a terrible place—there are all kinds of things that hurt you.”

  “I know. Can you really fly?”

  “Not very well. The trees... We bump into the branches and fall to the ground and... and it hurts so much!”

  “We? Are there more of you?”

  “Five...” The flaiad was gaining confidence. Now she was looking at the Girl with curiosity. “And what are you?”

  “I’m a girl.”

  “No, you can’t be. I’m a girl. Look at me. This is what girls look like.”

  “I know,” said the Girl with undisguised envy. “But I could have looked like you, once. This isn’t my real body, I’m sure it isn’t. They try to tell me it is, but I don’t believe them.” Oddly, she felt a kinship to this winged girl.

  “You must be almost as unhappy as we are. You look unhappy. You have lines between your eyes.”

  “Here.” The Girl extended a hand. She was about to ask the flaiad to help her to her feet, but the creature had backed away, flinching as though expecting a blow. “What’s the matter?”

  The pose was studied, almost ritualistic. One forearm was flung across the small face, the other arm was extended, palm flat, toward the Girl. The flaiad froze like that. “Don’t... hurt... me.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” The Girl crawled to her feet, brushing down the ragged remains of her dress and wishing she had the courage to go naked like the flaiad. “Don’t run away,” she added. The other seemed poised for flight, regarding her as though she were an unpredictable animal.

  “You’re so... huge. You could hurt me a lot, if you had a mind to.”

  “Well, I don’t have a mind to.” Changing the subject, which was becoming tedious, the Girl said, “Let’s go and find your friends. Where are they?”

  “By the lake.” The flaiad was still wary, but after a while she relaxed a little and led the Girl through the woods.

  “What’s your name?” asked the Girl conversationally.

  “Pain.”

  “Pain? That’s an odd name for a pretty child.”

  “It has its meaning. What... what’s yours?” asked Pain shyly.

  “I’m just called Girl.”

  “That’s an odd name, too.” And the flaiad actually smiled.

  “I think I have another name, and one day I’ll find out what it is. Until then, I’ll stick with Girl. It means something—like your name.”

  Then the trees became more spaced out and dark water glistened before them, motionless under the canopy of branches.

  “This is where we live,” said Pain.

  The Girl could not recall ever seeing a more dismal place.

  The lake was about one hundred meters across, dark and malodorous. Little patches of brown scum floated on the surface, which was in tiny trembling motion from the raindrops. In many places the trees actually stood in the water, their branches intermeshing overhead. Pain and the Girl stood in a small clearing at the water’s edge. Here the underbrush had been cleared back and the sticks and leaves woven into a rough hut.

  “These are my sisters,” said Pain, introducing four more flaiads, who stood or sat in varying attitudes of dejection beside the water. “Loneliness, Humiliation, Loss and Death.”

  As though discouraged by the sound of their own names, the flaiads assumed attitudes that, like Pain’s flinching, appeared almost formal. Loneliness sat with arms huddled about herself; Loss wept, with knuckles pressed to her eyes; and Death simply shivered. Only Humiliation struck no noticeable pose, but after a moment the Girl realized that the flaiad was blushing deeply.

  “You don’t seem very happy,” remarked the Girl after this had continued for a few moments.

  “Would you be happy living in such a dreadful place?”

  “No. In fact I’d probably leave. Why don’t you?”

  At this the poses became intensified, and Pain backed off as though the Girl had struck her across the face. “We can’t leave,” said Humiliation, blushing crimson. “This is our destiny—to remain here and suffer forever.”

  The Girl’s pity was changing slowly to irritation. “That’s ridiculous. If you don’t like it here, you could walk out just as easily as I walked in.”

  “But what about the
Swamp of Submission?”

  “If you mean that patch of boggy ground out there, what’s wrong with getting your feet wet? It’s a small price for escape.”

  “There are crocodiles in the swamp.”

  “I didn’t see any.”

  “They are there. They let you in—but they won’t let you out. Such is the way of the Swamp of Submission and its dreadful creatures.”

  The four other Fears postured afresh at this pronouncement from Death, and Loss’s weeping became a shrill wail. Humiliation said, “You must have been looking for this place yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t have arrived here.”

  The Girl was silent.

  “Now you’re here, do you like it? You say our destiny is ridiculous, but your own destiny guided your feet through the swamp.”

  The Girl said determinedly, “You could fly over the crocodiles. You could walk to the edge of the swamp and take off, and fly through to the end of the forest; then up and over the rest of the swamp.”

  “We cannot fly well enough to avoid the trees,” said Loneliness. “We’ve lived on the ground for so long that the powers have almost left us.”

  The Girl almost screamed in frustration as the wailing broke out afresh. “Well, if you can’t do anything else, at least change your names!”

  Pain seemed to be the most controlled of the flaiads at this point and, although flinching, she said, “I repeat—don’t you like it now you’re here? Are you renouncing the attitudes that brought you here?”

  “I wasn’t brought here by my attitudes,” said the Girl, annoyed. “I was poisoned by the May Bees and I woke up here.”

  “The May Bees only attack those who invite them.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Then try to leave.”

  “No. Not now. I’ll stick with it for a while.” The Girl’s lips pressed together as she stared around the clearing, beginning to realize her own stupidity, even more annoyed with herself than with the miserable flaiads.

  Legend does not relate how long the Girl stayed in the Forest of Fear, eating raw fish and weed from the lake, sleeping fitfully in the crude hut while the never-ending rain dripped through the roof, listening to the incessant whimpering of the flaiads. Some say she remained there for many years, although our knowledge of her character makes this difficult to believe. It is perhaps sufficient to say that she awakened one day knowing it was time to go.

  She stirred the flaiads with her foot. “Get up!” She was slimmer now—her simple diet had seen to that. She could never be as beautiful as the flaiads, though; physically she was a big baby and would remain that way for a long time yet. She resented the flaiads’ beauty, and she was not gentle when she roused them. “Get up!” she cried, a new restlessness running through her.

  “You’re hurting me!” cried Pain.

  “You’re going to leave us, I can tell!” wailed Loneliness.

  “No—you’re all coming with me. We’re all leaving. Today. Now.”

  “But we told you why we couldn’t leave!”

  “And I told you your reason was ridiculous. Now I’m going to prove it to you.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to the shore of the bog and we’re all going to hold hands, and we’re going to walk out into the mud, out past the trees. And”—she held up her hand as Death was about to object—“we won’t be killed by the crocodiles, simply because there are no crocodiles—they are creatures of your own fears. I know that now. I know what this place is, and how people get here, and how they get out again.”

  “A lot of them don’t get out. They drown in the lake, or get eaten by the crocodiles.”

  “If they’re stupid enough to believe in the crocodiles. I’m not that stupid.”

  “But I am,” said Humiliation quietly.

  Later they stood at the edge of the Swamp of Submission, strung out in a line, hand in hand. The mud had a thin coating of water and ripples showed—and what might have been dead logs, but then again might not.

  “Walk!” the Girl commanded.

  Loneliness cried, “Wait! Don’t go! Don’t leave me alone!”

  “Then walk.”

  Humiliation said, “I’ll get scared. I know I will. And I’ll run back and fall down in the mud and let you all down, and you’ll think I’m a coward.”

  “Keep holding our hands.”

  Pain said, “There are snags under the water—oh, my poor feet! I’m sure I’ll step on a snag and it’ll go right through my foot.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  Loss said, “Maybe the lake wasn’t such a bad place. We had some good times there. Maybe we should stay.”

  “It’s a disgusting, stinking place.”

  Death said, “There’s a crocodile.”

  And a ripple moved toward them.

  The Girl said, “That is not a crocodile.” She let go of the hands of the flaiads and plunged forward, snatching at the water. She held up a struggling frog for them to see, then threw it away. They moved forward again.

  They were nearly out from under the trees. The sky above was dark and menacing. The Girl reassured the flaiads, “Soon you’ll be able to fly away. Look—there’s the sky! How long is it since you’ve seen the sky?”

  The flaiads looked up, wondering. They fluttered their wings. The sky roared like a monster, and a flash of brilliant light stabbed toward them.

  The Swamp lit up and the hard shadows of the trees wheeled around. For a moment the Girl was scared again—and suddenly there were crocodiles everywhere, their eyes blinking red on the surface as they cruised

  toward the flaiads. A branch crashed down before them, blazing and sizzling. The flaiads broke the chain and, turning, ploughed frantically back toward the shore.

  The Girl stood there, waist-deep in filth while her moment of fear changed to quick rage. Her hair was matted with mud, her eyes were momentarily dazzled, something nameless wriggled under her foot. A sudden wind whipped sparks from the fire around her, stinging her skin. The crocodiles closed in.

  The Girl turned her face to the sky.

  “You up there!” she shouted at the heavens. “Damn you all to hell!”

  And the wind dropped and the crocodiles were gone. The last branch of the blazing bough began to slide beneath the surface, the flames flickering out.

  “Oh, no,” said the Girl. “You don’t get off so easily.”

  She snatched up the brand before the glow died and carried it back to the shore where the flaiads cowered. By the time she reached them the branch was burning again. She took it to a huge rotted bole and thrust it into the dry interior—and now, as though approving of what she did, the wind rose again, fanning the flames.

  “Die, Forest,” said the Girl...

  She led the flaiads back to the lake and they waited all day, while behind them the flames spread. When they huddled in the hut that evening, they could see the fire as a glow on the bellies of the clouds; and by midnight it was very close, and the crashing of trees was loud. The Girl led the flaiads into the lake and they crouched in the water close under the bank while the blaze roared overhead and all around.

  By morning the fire had passed on, so they emerged from the lake and stood on the blackened shore. Smoke trailed from a few broken trunks here and there, but most of the flames were out and the trees were dead, blackened and limbless.

  “Look,” said the Girl.

  Morning came all around them, in soft light the forest had never known before. Overhead the sky was blue and clear. As the flaiads stood in wonderment, the tips of the trees changed from black to gold and within minutes the floor of the Forest of Fear was illuminated with a golden strangeness it had never known. The sun rose, the shadows shortened and soon everything was light.

  “Now,” said the Girl. “Fly, flaiads!”

  “But the branches... Everything up there is strange and bright... We’re scared...”

  “The branches are burned off and you can fly straight up and out of here. Go on, now!
If you don’t fly, the forest will begin to grow again and the branches will close over you. Is that what you really want? To live here in misery forever? This is your chance, flaiads. Take it!”

  It was Humiliation who moved first. Blushing, she fluttered her wings, stifling her imagination, which told her how foolish she would look falling flat on her back. She jumped, fluttered and came down again.

  Nobody laughed.

  She jumped again and this time her wings bore her up between the blackened trunks, up past the sharp tips and into the golden sky.

  Laughing now, the other flaiads followed.

  The Girl watched them as they rose, their gossamer wings ablaze with light, their laughter becoming faint, until it sounded like the song of distant birds and their bodies were daystars against the sky. Then she turned away and walked toward the swamp, knowing the crocodiles would be gone.

  The Hosts

  So the Girl shook off the May Bees’ poison and freed the flaiads, who had fulfilled their use and were heard of no more. They occur in earlier legends from different parts of Old Earth but at the time of the Triad they were the tools of Starquin as he shaped the Girl to his Purpose.

  Starquin’s Purpose... This did not emerge until the Hate Bombs were planted, so the one very important event that happened before the Hate Bombs—the ingestion of bor by the beautiful tiger-Captain Spring—was accidental and had nothing to do with Starquin’s will. In fact the coming of the Macrobes was ultimately against the will of Starquin because it resulted in the Inner Think and human longevity, and the Regression... It is ironic to think that those tiny, kindly parasites were responsible at first for shortening human life.

  The Macrobes. There are many stories of the Macrobes and the beginnings of their partnership with Man, which resulted in the creation of a new form of homo sapiens. Probably the simplest is contained in an ancient recording of an event on a rock in the Asteroid Belt, sometime in the 95th millennium, at which time the new humans were known simply as the Hosts...