The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “I have the psy,” announced a slender jester, jingling his bells and advancing on the Girl.

  He disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  “He had nothing,” said the Girl, facing the Dream People as they began to move toward her. “He was only a smallwish, bluffing. Just think about that for a moment. You people have drifted so far away from reality that you don’t know a smallwish when he’s right beside you!”

  “So what?” someone called. “As long as it’s fun!”

  “All of you are phonies,” shouted the Girl, as an angry murmur began to build up. “But some of you are totally fake! You’re not even really there! You exist in other people’s minds! Once they stop believing in you, you’ll cease to exist, just like the Celestial Steam Locomotive!”

  “Wish her away!”

  “You can’t!” And suddenly a podium appeared behind the Girl, and she turned her back on them and mounted the steps. Taking a microphone, she stared deliberately at the crowd. The felino was real, and that fighting grupo of felinas, too. And the caiman, and the kikihuahuan digger. But that huge Us Ursa, blustering and calling on others to pool their psy and eliminate her...

  “You!” she shouted, pointing at him. “Fade out!”

  And he did. He was gone in an instant and the grass where he’d stood was not even bruised.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” the Girl asked, “that many of those people you call friends, whom you share your adventures with, are not real? Did you ever think they might not have minds of their own, but were just somebody else’s smallwish that battened onto you—not because they liked you, but simply because they needed your belief to maintain their existence? You’re surrounded by a crowd of freeloaders, leeching away your psy! Look around and ask yourself—how many real friends do you have?”

  And in the thoughtful silence, a small voice cried, “How can I tell?”

  A leonid roared, “Use your common sense, of course! Shut your ears to questioners and rabble-rousers, and just believe that human beings are good—and fun—and that Earth is the most wonderful planet in the Universe! Our psy is the gift of the Rainbow and we must use it wisely and well. This girl has taught us a lesson we needed, and I for one am thankful. Now, I’m sure we all have a lot of thinking to do!”

  He strode away and was cut down by a dozen skeptical smallwishers and flickered out like a snuffed candle.

  Felinos stared at felinas and caiman-eyed tumpiers. A group of identical El Tigres held their breath, glancing at their legendary wives, the beautiful Serenas. A lone Saba could be seen running her hands over her own body, her wondering eyes scared. A faint sigh came from the ether where an invisible god thing had been hovering, and a small pack of African hunting dogs began to sniff one another, whimpering uncertainly. Robots watched; Mohals and Solons gazed at Esmeraldas.

  A Karina disappeared.

  Then the panic began.

  Elizabeth’s Retrenchment, as it later became called, occupied a tiny period in the life of Dream Earth, yet later historians agreed that it was perhaps the most important event ever to occur in that imaginary world. During one subjective week the observed population fell from some 50,000 to around 15,000 persona, and the effects spread from Dome to Dome throughout Earth by way of the Rainbow’s circuits. No doubt the Rainbow accelerated the process, once it had started, on the grounds that it was beneficial for the population as a whole and freed up vast areas of the computer for more useful work. The Retrenchment was followed by a period of comparative significance known as the Age of Caradoc, during which the environment of Dream Earth became more logical and increasingly subject to the natural laws found in the real world. In this way, the neotenites became prepared for their eventual release from dependency on the Dome, although it was many years before they lived Outside in any numbers. By which time, of course, they were not neotenites.

  The Retrenchment did not happen easily. Thirty-five thousand people do not give up their identities without a fight—and after the initial panic even the Dream People began to resist the rate of disincorporation as their friends and creations disappeared before their eyes.

  On the fifth day of the retrenchment, the opposition got itself organized. A thousand Dream People had called for a night’s respite from the orgy of suspicion, and an unnatural quiet hung over Dream Earth. Ten thousand smallwishes—waitresses, mistresses, stunt men, gigolos—trembled in their beds. One smallwish bided his time, surrounded by a bodyguard of real Dream People who were expending the last flickers of their psy in reinforcing his credibility. In four days they had identified the origins of the Retrenchment, identified the Girl and learned something of her past. They and their small-wish were ready.

  The Girl awakened on the sixth morning. Having seen no reason why she shouldn’t sleep comfortably like anyone else, she had taken a room at the Admiral Benbow Inn. This was a pleasant place that had been operated by its smallwisher, Mrs. Hawkins, for several years. Mrs. Hawkins was an anomaly in Dream Earth: a person who liked to get through the day with a minimum of smallwishes; a person of abundant common sense who had supported the Girl through some of the more difficult phases of the Retrenchment.

  “Stay in bed this morning,” said Mrs. Hawkins. “I’ll bring you breakfast.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said the Girl gratefully. “I’m all psy’d out. I need to hole up for a while, otherwise somebody might take advantage of me. I have plenty of enemies out there. And anyway, now I’ve set everything in motion, it can carry on without me.”

  “You’ve earned a rest.” Mrs. Hawkins drew the curtains. Outside, it was still dark.

  “Somebody’s interfering with the sun,” said the Girl, suddenly uneasy.

  “It must be those people who call themselves the Reactionaries,” said Mrs. Hawkins, scanning the eastern sky for signs of daybreak. “They sent a public broadcast through the village yesterday afternoon while you were away, asking people to stop wasting their psy searching for smallwishes. They said the whole structure of Dream Earth might break down, with so much skepticism abroad.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said the Girl. “The Rainbow handles Composite Reality.”

  “So you’ve told me, and I believe you—but it doesn’t make the day any lighter. And there are a lot of people out there who are getting pretty scared. Even real people aren’t sure whether they might be smallwishes themselves, and they don’t want to find out.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the Girl after a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that too much. It seemed there were bigger issues.”

  “You did the right thing, all the same,” Mrs. Hawkins reassured her, leaving the room.

  Still uneasy, the Girl got up and went to the window. A few lights were on in the handful of houses that constituted the village. The single winding street was empty in the predawn grayness. The villagers, no doubt questioning the lateness of the sunrise, remained indoors, where their authenticity was less likely to be challenged. Then the Girl caught sight of a movement to the west, where the lane disappeared into mists and rolling meadowland. A lone figure was approaching the village. At least somebody was not afraid.

  She would not have been human if she hadn’t felt some regret for the disappearance of all those smallwishes. It was not their fault they were not real. And false or not, they felt a very real fear at the prospect of ceasing to exist. Consoling herself with the knowledge that it would all be over in a couple more days, she opened the window and leaned out to see who this lonely traveler was.

  The figure was moving slowly between the high hedgerows in a curiously zigzag fashion, so that the Girl might have thought he was drunk if it had not been for the steady purposefulness of his gait. It was almost as though he were searching, the way he walked steadily from one side of the lane to the other, working his way toward the village like a sailboat against the wind. Then, as she watched, his course straightened and he walked beside the eastern hedge. And now she could see that his arm was extended and he seemed to be jabbing at
the foliage as he walked, possibly with a stick, almost as though he was...

  Blind.

  As the Girl moved back from the window and the great pounding began in her heart, the figure passed a lighted window and she saw the black cloak, the pallid face. She sank into a chair, trying to smallwish herself somewhere else, knowing that she had already exhausted her psy, beginning to tremble uncontrollably...

  Then she heard the tap-tap of the blind man’s stick on the street, and a pause.

  “Go away,” she whispered. “Go away, please.”

  Then shuffling footsteps, and a long scraping as the stick was drawn along the wall of the inn.

  She heard the door latch rattle downstairs. Then there was an insistent knocking and she heard Mrs. Hawkins call, “Wait a moment, there! I’m coming as fast as I can!”

  She heard the front door creak open, and a muffled conversation. Next, footsteps on the stairs... Mrs. Hawkins’ footsteps. They stopped outside the door.

  “There’s a man come to see you.” Mrs. Hawkins lowered her voice. “A poor old blind man—such a sorry sight. I think he wants you to help him.”

  “Send him away,” whispered the Girl. Then she heard the dreadful shuffling on the stairs. “Oh, no... no,” she groaned.

  “What’s that? I can’t hear you.”

  “For God’s sake, get rid of—”

  And the door crashed open.

  She caught one glimpse of Mrs. Hawkins’ startled face before the innkeeper was thrust aside and Pew sprang into the doorway, cloak whirling about him, rolling eyes staring this way and that from under the green eyeshade, stick jabbing toward her like a rapier. He scuttled forward, slammed the door behind him and threw the bolt.

  “Now, me beauty...” he snarled.

  The Girl had moved into the far corner of the room. Beside her stood a table with china ornaments on it. Striving to concentrate her thoughts, she dragged her gaze away from the terrifying figure of the blind man to a small figurine: a china shepherdess. She looked from the shepherdess to the blind man, gauged the distance and said “I wish...”

  Too slowly, the figurine rose from the table and soared toward Pew’s head.

  He swung his stick contemptuously and batted it aside.

  “Ye forget,” he said quietly. “‘Tis no simple fool ye deal with.” He began to advance a slow step at a time, crouching, stick stabbing at her. “‘Tis a troublemaker you are—and I’m going to make an end to all that.”

  “Yes, but I’m real”—the Girl’s stouthearted effort was spoiled by an involuntary gulp—“and you’re only a smallwish! You can’t hurt me!”

  “Ha!” Judging her position by her voice, he swung his stick. It crashed to the wall a fraction from her head, bringing down a shower of plaster. She stumbled aside, and Pew, casting his stick away, flung himself on her with a yell of triumph. “By the Powers, I have ye!” He ran his fingers over her, chuckling. “Now, lass, ye’ll suffer.”

  The Girl slumped to the floor, paralyzed with fear. Her success in the Swamp of Submission was forgotten; all past events faded into the horror of the present—the stinking form of Blind Pew pressing her into the floor, his bony knees digging into her flesh, his skeletal fingers kneading and probing her body while all the time he chuckled and cursed and drooled, until his fingers, tiring of their entertainment, crept upward and began to fasten themselves on her throat.

  He can’t do this, she thought. He simply can’t—he’s only a smallwish!

  “Now we’ll see who’s real,” said Pew, an age-old creation reinforced by a thousand of yesterday’s wishes.

  There was a thundering in the Girl’s head like storm waves against the base of a cliff.

  As though from a different happentrack, she heard a voice say, “You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, blind man.”

  “Eh?” The pressure relaxed for a moment as Pew swung round in surprise. “And who might you be, me lad?”

  Pushing the blind man’s cloak away from her eyes, the Girl saw a vision. Standing in the middle of the room was a handsome young man wearing a crimson doublet and black pants. Beside him stood a girl of unusual beauty, fair-haired and dressed in a long silver dress studded with jewels. They made a somewhat foppish couple, but the Girl was in no position to criticize them on that count. The young man smiled. “I am Caradoc,” he said.

  “Never heard of you.”

  “I don’t often bother to appear in person,” said Caradoc, “but you and a few others have been making a nuisance of yourselves this last couple of days. Speaking of which...” Noticing the darkness outside, he drew his sword and pointed it at the window.

  The sun crept over the horizon and the village lit up.

  “By thunder,” muttered Pew, as the sunlight warmed his face. He scrambled to his feet and edged toward the door. “Ye have strange powers, mister!”

  “Wait!” The sword was at Pew’s throat and Caradoc’s expression held no mercy. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you here and now.”

  “Have pity,” Pew began to whimper, pawing at the blade. “I’m only a poor wretched smallwish, the creation of other men’s evil.”

  “A little more than that by now, I think. You’ve been around too long, Pew. You’ve taken on a kind of substance.” A trickle of blood showed at the tip of the sword as Pew jerked back with a squeal of fright. “But not so much substance that I couldn’t finish you off if I wished. I’m not going to, however—not right now. I’ve spoken with the Oracle, and she tells me there is a twisted purpose in your existence. So you must live—for a while, anyway. But I’ll tell you this, Pew: Once you’ve fulfilled your destiny in the Ifalong, I shall dispose of you. Until then, I advise you to get back to the Land of Lost Dreams, where you can’t do any harm.”

  He dealt the blind man a stinging blow across the shoulders with the flat of the blade. Pew gave a yelp of fright, scuttled for the door, tripped over his stick and fell heavily, snatched it up as he scrambled to his feet, slid the bolt aside and jerked open the door, and was gone. They heard his footsteps thundering down the stairs and out into the street, then the frantic tap-tap-tap as he hurried back down the lane the way he’d come.

  “And now,” said Caradoc, smiling, “it’s time we sent you home, Girl.”

  Delta’s End

  Forty-three standard minutes later the Triad was reunited in the Rainbow Room. Manuel was the first to see the Girl as she waddled through the Do-Portal, still shaken, but smiling as she caught sight of them.

  “Girl!” The room was empty now; all the images had gone. There was just the distant figure toward which Manuel ran, Zozula following with more dignity.

  “Girl!” Manuel seized her hands, grinning. “How are you? What have you been doing? I thought we’d never see you again!” The Girl, laughing too, said, “Manuel, you don’t know the half of it.” “Well, tell me! Come and sit over here. Get her something to eat,” he ordered a passing nurse in peremptory fashion.

  Zozula arrived. “It’s good to see you again, Girl,” he said formally. Then, to Manuel’s amazement, he took her hand and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Tell us what’s been happening to you,” he said.

  They sat on gossamer couches and the Girl luxuriated as Manuel arranged cushions under her head and feet. “It’s so good to be back,” she said. “So good to see you both again.”

  “No regrets about leaving Dream Earth this time, Girl?” asked Zozula, more anxiously than he’d intended.

  “I don’t belong in there anymore. Dream Earth is no substitute for the real world. The sooner we can get those people out of there, the better.” She went on to describe her success in persuading the Dream People to show some common sense.

  The Triad compared notes, ate and drank. And at some point Zozula had to say, “Eloise died, of course. You knew that?”

  “I’d guessed as much.”

  “I wondered if the Mole really understood. It must have been a shock to him.”

  “He to
ok it very well,” said the Girl with a small, private smile.

  It happened later that day, and it happened without warning.

  Selena and Juni had joined them, the former a little more cheerful, now that the failure of last year’s breeding program was behind her and the new season had started. With the Mole now safely in the Rainbow and the Girl at the console, she was optimistic.

  “Now, perhaps, we can start getting some help from the computer,” she said.

  And the Rainbow chose that moment to go crazy.

  It had been brooding for centuries in its mild electronic way. It had observed a certain tribe of neotenites in the delta, but for a long time it had done nothing because no real threat had developed.

  The Song of Earth relates that it was the death of Lergs that triggered the Rainbow, because this resulted in Trevis’s joining the gestalt on the mud flats. The gestalt’s potential immediately increased a hundredfold, and there was no limit to the knowledge they could amass. They began to impinge on the Greataway. Some minstrels suppose they could have turned the whole Universe into their own private Dream Earth, but that is perhaps too fanciful. Nevertheless the foreboding of Trevis was very real: Then we will be destroyed, because someone more powerful than us will want it that way...

  The Rainbow decided the time had come.

  The walls of the Rainbow Room resonated like a sounding board.

  “What was that?” Zozula cried.

  Manuel found the Girl in his arms and held her as she trembled. Other Cuidadors arrived at a run, followed by a train of valets, trolleys, suckers, waiters and other robots, out of control and running to the Rainbow. Chutes began to spew food and drink, while the Cuidadors gazed in awe at the show the Rainbow was putting on. The entire chamber, a kilometer long and half a kilometer high, was ablaze with color, dancing and crackling around the humans—solid color that seemed to press on the eyes in the same way that

  the sounds, deep and vibrant, pressed on the ears. More people arrived: engineers and astronomers and dietitians, nurses and administrators, edging into the Rainbow Room with fear in their eyes.