But slowly, imperceptibly, Snow’s little body lengthens and rounds out, until when the ice melts one year he sees that small breasts have budded on her narrow ribs. The day before she had been still a child; today she is unmistakably a baby woman. The Healer sighs, studying her tender animated face. It is hard to see her as defective; the lightly closed eyes seem so normal. But two of the dead-born infants have been very pale and whiteeyed. Is this a lethal mutation? His problem is upon him. He cannot resolve it; he determines to call a council of the tribe.
But his plan is never to be put to action. Someone else has been studying Snow too. It is the Weatherwoman’s youngest son, who follows her to the fern-root grove.
“This is the kind you eat,” Snow tells him, holding up the yellow fiddleheads. He stares down at her delicious little body. Impossible to remember or care that she is thrice his age.
“I want—I want to talk to you, Snow.”
“Umm?” She smiles up at his voice. His heart pounds.
“Snow . . .”
“What, Byorg?” Listening so intently, the silvery lashes quivering as if they will lift and open to him. Yet they do not, and pity for her blindness chokes him. He touches her arm, she comes against him naturally. She is smiling, her breathing quickened. He holds her, thinking how she must feel his touch in her dark world, her helplessness. He must be gentle.
“Byorg?” she breathes. “Oh, Byorg—”
Trying to restrain himself he holds her more tightly to him, touching her, feeling her trembling. He is trembling too, caressing her beneath her light tunic, feeling her yielding, half trying to pull away, her breath hot on his neck.
“Oh, Snow—” Above the pounding of his blood he is vaguely conscious of a sound overhead, but he can think only of the body in his arms.
A harsh yowl breaks out behind him.
“Fliers!”
He whirls around too late—the red flapping figure has launched something at him, a spear—and he is staggering, grasping a bony shaft sunk in his own neck.
“Run, Snow!” he tries to shout. But she is there still, above him, trying to hold him as he falls. More Fliers pound past. As the world dims, he sees in last wonderment her huge eyes opening wide and white.
Silence.
Snow raises herself slowly, still open-eyed. She lets the dead boy’s head down to the moss. Three dead Fliers sprawl around them. She listens, hears faintly the sound of screaming from the village. It is a major attack, she realizes. And Fliers have never used weapons before. Shivering, she strokes Byorg’s hair. Her face is crumpled in grief, but the eyes remain open, silver reflectors focused at infinity.
“No,” she says brokenly. “No!” She jumps up, begins running toward the village, stumbling as she races open-eyed, as a blind person runs. Three Fliers swoop behind her. She screams and turns to face them. They drop in red, ragged heaps and she runs on, hearing the clamor of battle at the village walls.
The frantic villagers do not see her coming, they are struggling in a horde of Fliers who have infiltrated the side gate and broken loose among the huts. At the main gate the torches have started thatch fires; Fliers and Whites alike have fallen back. Suddenly there is redoubled shouting from the huts. Six Fliers are seen clumsily hopping and gliding from roof to roof. They carry stolen infants.
Men and women clamber fiercely after them, shouting imprecations. A Flier pauses to bite savagely into his victim’s neck, leaps onward. The evil band outrace their pursuers and launch themselves onto the outer wall.
“Stop them!” a woman shrieks, but there is no one there.
But as the Fliers poise to leap, something does halt them. Instead of sailing they are tumbling limply with their captives, falling on the ground below the walls. And other Fliers have stopped yowling and striking, they are falling too.
The villagers pause uncertainly and become aware of a stillness spreading from a point beside the gates.
Then they see her, the girl Snow, in the blue evening light. A slender white shape with her back to them, surrounded by a red ruin of dead Fliers. She is leaning bent over, dragged down by a shaft sticking in her side. Blood is flooding down her thighs.
Painfully she tries to turn toward them. They see her pull feebly at the spear in her belly. As they watch aghast she pulls the weapon out and drops it. And still stands upright, blood pouring down.
The Healer is nearest. He knows it is too late, but he runs toward her across the rank bodies of the Fliers on the ground. In the dimness he can see a shining loop of intestine torn and hanging from her mortal wound. He slows, staring. Then he sees the blood-flow staunch and cease. She is dead—but she stands there still.
“Snow—”
She lifts her head blindly, smiles with a strange, timid composure.
“You’re hurt,” he says stupidly, puzzled because the gaping flesh of her wound seems somehow radiant in the fading light. Is it—moving? He stops, staring fearfully, not daring to go closer. As he stares, the rent in which he has seen viscera seems to be filming over, is drawing itself closed. The white body before him is bloodstained but becoming whole before his unbelieving gaze. His eyes start from their sockets, he trembles violently. She smiles more warmly and stands straighter, pushing back her hair.
Behind them a last Flier yowls as it is run down.
Has he had an hallucination? Surely so, he tells himself. He must say nothing.
But as he thinks this he hears an indrawn gasp behind him. Another, others have seen this too. Someone mutters sibilantly. He senses panic.
Those Fliers, he thinks confusedly, how did they die? They show no wounds. What killed them? When they came near her, did she—what did she—
A word is being hissed behind him now, a word the Whites have not heard for two hundred years. The muttered hissing is rising. And then it is broken with wails. Mothers have found that the saved children are lying too still among the Fliers who had captured them, are in fact not saved but dead.
“Witch! Witch! Witch!”
The crowd has become a menacing ring behind him, they are closing warily but with growing rage upon the white, still girl. Her blind face turns questioningly, still half smiling, not understanding what threatens. A stone whizzes past her, another strikes her shoulder.
“Witch! Killer witch!”
The Healer turns on them, holding up his arms.
“No! Don’t! She’s not—” But his voice is lost in the shouting. His voice will not obey him, he too is terrified. More stones fly by from the shadows. Behind him the girl Snow cries out in pain. Women trample forward, shoving him aside. A man jumps past him with uplifted spear.
“No!” the Healer shouts.
In full leap the man is suddenly slumping, is falling bonelessly upon the dead Fliers. And women beyond him are falling too. Screams mingle with the shouts. Hardly knowing what he does, the Healer bends to the downed man, encounters lifelessness. No breath, no wound; only death. And the woman beside him the same, and the next, and all around.
The Healer becomes aware of unnatural quiet spreading through the twilight. He lifts his head. All about him the people of his village have fallen like scythed grain. Not one is standing. As he stares, a small boy runs from behind a hut, and is instantly struck down. Unable to grasp the enormity, the Healer sees his whole village lying dead.
Behind him where the girl Snow stands alone there is silence too, terror-filled. He knows she has not fallen; it is she who has done this thing. The Healer is a deeply brave man. Slowly he forces himself to turn and look.
She is there upright among the dead, a slight childish form turned away from him, one hand pitifully clutching her shoulder. Her face in profile is contorted, whether from pain or anger he cannot tell. Her eyes are open. He sees one huge silver orb glinting wide, roving the silent village. As he stares, her head turns slowly around to where he stands. Her gaze reaches him.
He falls.
When the dawn fills the valley with gray light, a small, pale figure com
es quietly from the huts. She is alone. In all the valley no breath sighs, no live thing stirs. The dawn gleams on her open silver eyes.
Moving composedly, she fills her canteen from the well and places food in her simple backpack. Then she gazes for a last time on the tumbled bodies of her people, reaches out her hand and draws back again, her face without expression, her eyes blank and wide. She hoists her pack to her shoulders. Walking lightly, resiliently—for she is unwounded—she sets out on the path up the valley, toward where she knows another village lies.
The morning brightens around her. Her slight figure is tender with the promise of love, her face lifted to the morning breeze is sweet with life. In her heart is loneliness; she is of mankind and she goes in search of human companionship.
Her first journey will not be long. But it will be soon resumed, and resumed again, and again resumed and again, for she carries wasting in her aura, and Death in her open eyes. She will find and lose, and seek and find and lose again, and again seek. But she has time. She has all the time of forever, time to search the whole world over and over again, for she is immortal.
Of her own kind she will discover none. Whether any like her have been born elsewhere she will never know. None but she have survived.
Where she goes Death goes too, inexorably. She will wander forever, until she is the last human, is indeed Humanity itself. In her flesh the eternal promise, in her gaze the eternal doom, she will absorb all. In the end she will wander and wait alone through the slow centuries for whatever may come from the skies.
. . . And thus the Beast and its Death are at last at one, as when the fires of a world conflagration die away to leave at their heart one imperishable crystal shape. Forged of Life-in-Death, the final figure of humanity waits in perpetual stasis upon the spent, uncaring Earth. Until, after unimaginable eons, strangers driven by their own agonies come from the stars to provide her unknown end. Perhaps she will call to them.
The material on the Kiowa Indians here is due, with thanks, to N. Scott Momaday’s beautiful elegy, The Way to Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press, 1969, and Ballantine Books.
SLOW MUSIC
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream. . . .
We come between man and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
—W. B. YEATS
LIGHTS CAME ON as Jakko walked down the lawn past the house; elegantly concealed spots and floods which made the night into a great intimate room. Overhead the big conifers formed a furry nave drooping toward the black lake below the bluff ahead. This had been a beloved home, he saw; every luxurious device was subdued to preserve the beauty of the forested shore. He walked on a carpet of violets and mosses, in his hand the map that had guided him here from the city.
It was the stillness before dawn. A long-winged night bird swirled in to catch a last moth in the dome of light. Before him shone a bright spearpoint. Jakko saw it was the phosphorescent tip of a mast against the stars. He went down velvety steps to find a small sailboat floating at the dock like a silver leaf reflected on a dark mirror.
In silence he stepped on board, touched the mast.
A gossamer sail spread its fan, the mooring parted soundlessly. The dawn breeze barely filled the sail, but the craft moved smoothly out, leaving a glassy line of wake. Jakko halfpoised to jump. He knew nothing of such playtoys, he should go back and find another boat. As he did so, the shore lights went out, leaving him in darkness. He turned and saw Regulus rising ahead where the channel must be. Still, this was not the craft for him. He tugged at the tiller and sail, meaning to turn it back.
But the little boat ran smoothly on, and then he noticed the lights of a small computer glowing by the mast. He relaxed; this was no toy, the boat was fully programmed and he could guess what the course must be. He stood examining the sky, a statue-man gliding across reflected night.
The eastern horizon changed, veiled its stars as he neared it. He could see the channel now, a silvery cut straight ahead between dark banks. The boat ran over glittering shallows where something splashed hugely, and headed into the shining lane. As it did so, all silver changed to lead and the stars were gone. Day was coming. A great pearl-colored blush spread upward before him, developed bands of lavender and rays of coral-gold fire melting to green iridescence overhead. The boat was now gliding on a ribbon of fiery light between black-silhouetted banks. Jakko looked back and saw dazzling cloud-cities heaped behind him in the west. The vast imminence of sunrise. He sighed aloud.
He understood that all this demonstration of glory was nothing but the effects of dust and vapor in the thin skin of air around a small planet, whereon he crawled wingless. No vastness brooded; the planet was merely turning with him into the rays of its mediocre primary. His family, everyone, knew that on the River he would encounter the Galaxy itself in glory. Suns beyond count, magnificence to which this was nothing. And yet—and yet to him this was not nothing. It was intimately his, man-sized. He made an ambiguous sound in his throat. He resented the trivialization of this beauty, and he resented being moved by it. So he passed along, idly holding the sail rope like a man leashing the living wind, his face troubled and very young.
The little craft ran on unerringly, threading the winding sheen of the canal. As the sun rose, Jakko began to hear a faint drone ahead. The sea surf. He thought of the persons who must have made this voyage before him: the ship’s family, savoring their final days of mortality. A happy voyage, a picnic. The thought reminded him that he was hungry; the last groundcar’s synthesizer had been faulty.
He tied the rope and searched. The boat had replenished its water, but there was only one foodbar. Jakko lay down in the cushioned well and ate and drank comfortably, while the sky turned turquoise and then cobalt. Presently they emerged into an enormous lagoon and began to run south between low islands. Jakko trailed his hand and tasted brackish salt. When the boat turned east again and made for a seaward opening, he became doubly certain. The craft was programmed for the River, like almost everything else on the world he knew.
Sure enough, the tiny bark ran through an inlet and straight out into the chop beyond a long beach, extruded outriggers, and passed like a cork over the reef foam on to the deep green swells beyond. Here it pitched once and steadied; Jakko guessed it had thrust down a keel. Then it turned south and began to run along outside the reef, steady as a knife cut with the wind on its quarter. Going Riverward for sure. The nearest River place was here called Vidalita or Beata, or sometimes Falaz, meaning “illusion.” It was far south and inland. Jakko guessed they were making for a landing where a moveway met the sea. He had still time to think, to struggle with the trouble under his mind.
But as the sun turned the boat into a trim white-gold bird flying over green transparency, Jakko’s eyes closed and he slept, protected by invisible deflectors from the bow-spray. Once he opened his eyes and saw a painted fish tearing along magically in the standing wave below his head. He smiled and slept again, dreaming of a great wave dying, a wave that was a many-headed beast. His face became sad and his lips moved soundlessly, as if repeating, “No . . . no . . .”
When he woke they were sailing quite close by a long bluff on his right. In the cliff ahead was a big white building or tower, only a little ruined. Suddenly he caught sight of a figure moving on the beach before it. A living human? He jumped up to look. He had not seen a strange human person in many years.
Yes—it was a live person, strangely colored gold and black. He waved wildly.
The person on the beach slowly raised an arm.
Alight with excitement, Jakko switched off the computer and grabbed the rudder and sail. The line of reef surf seemed open here. He turned the boat shoreward, riding on a big swell. But the wave left him. He veered erratically, and the surf behind broached into the boat, overturning it and throwing him out. He knew how to swim; he su
rfaced and struck out strongly for the shore, spluttering brine. Presently he was wading out onto the white beach, a short, strongly built, reddened young male person with pale hair and water-blue eyes.
The stranger was walking hesitantly toward him. Jakko saw it was a thin dark-skinned girl wearing a curious netted hat. Her body was wrapped in orange silk, and she carried heavy gloves in one hand. Three nervous moondogs followed her. He began turning water out of his shorts pockets as she came up.
“Your . . . boat,” she said in the language of that time. Her voice was low and uncertain.
They both turned to look at the confused place by the reef where the sailboat floated half-submerged.
“I turned it off. The computer.” His words came jerkily too, they were both unused to speech.
“It will come ashore down there.” She pointed, still studying him in a wary, preoccupied way. She was much smaller than he. “Why did you turn? Aren’t you going to the River?”
“No.” He coughed. “Well, yes, in a way. My father wants me to say good-bye. They left while I was traveling.”
“You’re not . . . ready?”
“No. I don’t—” He broke off. “Are you staying alone here?”
“Yes. I’m not going, either.”
They stood awkwardly in the sea wind. Jakko noticed that the three moondogs were lined up single file, tiptoeing upwind toward him with their eyes closed, sniffing. They were not, of course, from the moon, but they looked it, being white and oddly shaped.
“It’s a treat for them,” the girl said. “Something different.” Her voice was stronger now. After a pause she added, “You can stay here for a while if you want. I’ll show you, but I have to finish my work first.”
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 56