I really ought to have borne in mind what Andri told me about all those babies bodies lying in cold caverns under Eeden waiting for dead Kas to return from the stars to occupy them. A full-blown artificial body awaiting me at journey's end wouldn't have been a bad exchange; but what happened next was downright humiliating.
The Worm had known what I was heading into. Obviously! And damn it, I'd known too, deep down. Yet I'd made believe that in my case things might be different, special. I was the secret agent of a junior god, wasn't I? A secret agent is a bold adventurer. She's competent. She's always on the move. She's able to look after herself.
All of a sudden I was in some other place. Bright lights were blinding me. Things were interfering with me. And I was feeble. And I was tiny.
I screamed.
Don't babies always scream?
Part Two
The Cherubs
I was racing through redwood forest as fast as my little girl's legs would carry me. The ground was scant of undergrowth, naked of boltholes or brakes where I could hide. Between each massive trunk was so much open space that it was easy to spot my fleeing shape from way behind. Even the lowest branches were far too high up for a little girl to leap and scramble into.
A metallic macaw watched me from a high perch.
"Help, they'll kill me!" I called to it raggedly.
The mech-bird bobbed its head, as much as to say, "Message acknowledged!" but it did no more. Or, if the bird did speak to the Godmind, it didn't bother telling me so. I pounded on, although my legs were turning rapidly to jelly.
If only I could get out of line of sight! Then maybe I could slip behind a trunk and slide around it while the bloody-minded boys— Sons of the Truesoil, all of them—raced past . . . Well, that wouldn't work.
I glanced back.
The hunting pack of little boys had strung out, but that didn't mean I was outdistancing them. They were running relays now. As soon as those in the lead tired a bit, they dropped back to a quick trot, letting the former laggards sprint ahead. Me, I had no choice but to race, fit to burst my heart.
My glance excited them.
"Witchette!" taunted a voice. "Wormy wormy witchette!"
Witchette, indeed! Not even a full-blown witch. They were really playing the part of small boys now. Maybe they thought if they kept up a pretence of fun and games, the Godmind would condone their antics. But in those young bodies nestled evil, squalid, adult minds, bent on tearing me to pieces.
The Godmind couldn't be so dumb, even if this bunch of cherubs were Flawed Ones, from our own notoriously disadvantaged world. Maybe the Godmind wanted me ripped to shreds.
"River-bitch!"
"Water-witch!"
In another minute my heart would crack. My lungs would burst. My legs would flop. How far did this fucking forest stretch? Right the way across California? Where was the next service-hatch?
At least those squalid little boys couldn't possibly rape me before killing me—not unless they raped me with a stick.
Hey, wait a bit! If they did start in on torturing me instead of killing me straight off, and if they took their time over it, and if the Godmind did decide to butt in, then I could probably be patched together again. I simply couldn't let them kill me. I didn't know enough yet, to die.
Come to think of it, what better way to goad these Sons into tormenting me than by sneering at their prepubescent impotence? By taunting their lost manhood, their vanished virility? That ought to rankle.
Well, I'd been the one to think of rape; with a stick. . . .
I saw a fallen stick, the size of my arm. (Which wasn't very large.) A cudgel, no less! Skidding to a halt, I hoisted the stick. I needed both hands to hold it. Stumbling to the nearest trunk, I backed up against the bark and waited for the boys to come, ready to swing my weapon.
A fair bit of wood was lying around hereabouts. Enough for a bonfire? Suppose I could incite them to bum me, the way they burned witches back home? That should set off a fire-alarm and bring the Godmind's bits and pieces rushing to the rescue.
Oh hell and shit. Rape or the fire; or both.
One puzzle remained: how had they rumbled me? Or had I been set up?
The boys straggled to a halt in a half-circle. They were panting heavily.
* * *
"The Flawed Ones": that was how cherubs from our world were known, here in Eeden upon the planet Earth.
Earth was the name for this world of our origin; I knew that now. Eeden was merely the name of the reception area set aside for us millions on millions of reborn cherubs: roughly speaking, half of the North American land-mass (which is considerable).
In choosing the name Eeden, the Godmind had been "mobilizing a precognitive myth". So I'd been told by my Cyclopedia.
Precog myths were tales dreamed up by our primitive ancestors on Earth which forecast the far future—in other words the present time, the now—and which were used as guidelines to bring it into being.
One such myth concerned a God who would be bom of flesh. And lo, the Godmind had evolved out of the thinking-machines conceived by human brains, built by human hands.
Another myth concerned Eeden: the paradise which lay ahead in time The ancient spinners of precog myth back in the past were exiled from paradise by the span of years yawning between then and now. Yet one day, they dreamed, paradise would become a reality on Earth; and now it was so.
Precog myth also foresaw how the spirits of the dead would take up residence in another world, as chembs. And so it came to pass, with the slight difference that it was the star-dead from other worlds in the galaxy who flocked home along the psylink to Eeden to be bom again.
"Unless ye become as little children," declared the myth. Also: "And in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor bear babies." Our growth from babyhood was enormously speeded up compared with normal development, but our bodies quit growing short of puberty. We bom-again chembs all retained children's bodies lifelong, till we died our second deaths. Such was the nature of this new flesh given us by the Godmind.
Outside of Eeden in the rest of Earth, people grew up normally to womanhood and manhood. Yet it was we chembs who brought those ordinary mortals wisdom—by going out amongst them as the little aliens in their midst, the harvest of the galaxy, the perpetual children of the stars. "Out of the mouths of babes. . . ." There in the outside world we chembs were adored, protected, cherished.
In another week's time I too was due to go outside. So this was the Sons' last chance to clobber me.
Maybe the Godmind had been watching me all this while, wondering what my plan was; and now it had decided to have me snuffed. Again, maybe not.
But I'm running ahead of myself—would that I could have equally outstripped my pursuers!
I'm running way ahead. . . .
When I first came out of Ka-space and became a baby, I was pretty confused. I was lying flappy, floppy and feeble on soft fabric in a low glass cradle. I was blinded by bright lights, I was assaulted by machines.
And these machines were most unlike any we had back home. These ones had as many soft parts as hard parts. What's more, they acted of their own accord, like living creatures.
I soon calmed down. A machine saw to that. It squirted a blue fog at me, and panic went away.
"Rejoice!" proclaimed a voice, "You are safe in the bosom of Eeden, as promised. Your new brain is programmed with Panglos, in which I'm speaking to you. You'll need to exercise your voice for fluency. For the present kindly blink thrice to signify yes, twice for no. Do you understand me?"
I blinked three times.
"Excellent. Now: are you fully aware of your situation?"
Ah. They didn't know who I was, or where I came from!
This was a ticklish moment—and I don't just mean because of the tubes and other things tickling me, or the peculiar squirmy in-sucking sensation down in my crotch region. What sort of new arrivals wouldn V be fully aware of their situation? Presumably those from a world such as
mine. How would the machines go about disposing of undesirable babies? Would knives descend? I felt like a fish hauled ashore, flopping helplessly, about to be gutted. But I had to chance my hand; I needed information.
So I blinked twice, for no.
"Acknowledged." This was a new voice. A crisper voice, as though there was a different type of mind behind it. "It's highly probable that you're from a flawed world where the Satan-Snake foretold by precog myth has confused or corrupted my people, correct?"
Deciding to go along with the voice, I blinked: yes.
"Since you agree with that analysis, I can assume that my heritage still remains intact on your world. So: do you struggle to defeat the Snake?"
Yes, I lied. (Well, that was true of half of my world. The nasty half.)
"Are you from a waterworld of islands?"
No.
"Are you from the western shore of a long river bounded by wild ocean, precipice and desert?"
Yes.
I wasn't bom in the west, but surely I could pass for a westerner. . . .
"Identified: World 37."
The next question really caught me off balance. (In so far as any baby lying supine can be caught off balance!)
"Nearest large town?" And the voice started to reel off a list of western towns. The Godmind knew more about our world than I'd expected. Yet of course that figured: it had been receiving new arrivals for centuries. Luckily for me the string of names began in the north. This gave me a few seconds to decide which foul hole in the south (which I knew at first hand) to plump for.
". . . Adamopolis?"
". . . Dominy?"
"Pleasegod?"
I blinked yes.
"Acknowledged." And at once a different voice commenced my orientation. This last voice belonged to my Cyclopedia.
Cyclopedia! Once again I'm running ahead!
At this point I think I'd be well advised to capsule the set-up on Earth quickly so that I can get on with my story. (By the end of The Book of the River I flatter myself that I'd learned a few of what the Ajelobo critics call "narrative techniques".)
So I'll allow a couple of pages for your orientation, gentle reader- then it's right on to my meeting with Yorp the Exotic and his gang. And if you think I'm being stingy about facts you might need to know if you go to Eeden when you die, believe me, by the time I've finished gabbing on you'll know all you need to know, for what the information's worth. If Eeden's where you're headed—and of course you might not be—you'll arrive so wised-up compared with the majority of chembs that you might be well advised to act dumb; otherwise the Godmind may just grow suspicious of your motives.
* * *
We aliens were all reborn in baby bodies at one or other of numerous creches scattered throughout Eeden. The host bodies were continuously being produced in underground bio-vats by machines of the Godmind, like pie crusts in a giant bakery awaiting the filling to be popped into them. After manufacture, these bodies "lived" in a state of "ego-suspension", awaiting our influx down the psylinks from wherever. On being "activated" the new bodies grew greedily and rapidly—such was the nature of our new flesh—till within about eight weeks we were toddling competently and within a couple of years we were fully-fledged boys and girls of apparent age eight or nine years. At that apparent age we would stay.
We all spoke Panglos, the polyglot world tongue of Earth designed by the Godmind long ago before the seedship that settled our world even set off. Even today our own native language isn't too different from Panglos. Panglos isn't a language that drifts easily, and our own speech certainly hasn't drifted far at all compared with the home languages of the Exotics.
(Exotics: there I go again. Getting ahead of myself.)
As soon as we grew into toddlers, we were shunted out of the ever-busy creches to one of many minivilles. These were miniature towns, under weather domes, all built to toddler size and copied from various ancient cities of Earth. (Cities which themselves had been rebuilt by the Godmind, life-size, on their original sites for the ordinary Earth folk to live in.) I myself spent this period of adjustment in Little Italia, first in Classical Roma, then in adjacent Renaissance Roma. All this time I was accompanied by my personal Cyclopedia, a mobile fact-machine and nursemaid on which I could ride, a-saddle, whenever my sprouting young limbs grew weary.
Then it was goodbye to the minivilles, and out into Nature: a nature which was wild yet benign and well supervised. No Cyclopedia accompanied me now. Scattered across the surface of Eeden, instead, were large numbers of service-hatches providing nourishment and knowledge and most anything we wanted, including transport through underground tubes to any other part of Eeden. Assorted beasts and birds, which were actually machines (called Graces, Loving Graces) kept an eye on the land and on us.
Out in Nature, roaming, we young aliens got to know the smell and touch of the Earth—and oh, the marvel (for me) of the waxing and waning of the giant Moon in the sky! We also got to know each other better; and got to know ourselves, discovering what sort of little boy or girl we were each growing up to be.
Our host bodies were made in vats, as I say, by bio-machines. But they were all different. Thus I was the only one in my particular creche group with almond eyes, and on my head grew straight, jet- black hair. (Though no darkling hair would ever grace the rest of my anatomy.) My skin was cinnamon in hue, and I was inclined to be plump if I didn't watch my diet. On the other hand I was fairly tall for a child, which compensated for this. Though I would never be a woman, at least I was female.
I suppose we cherubs could as easily have been sexless. But the Godmind liked the idea of us being little boys and girls, just as it liked the idea of the ancient cities of Earth. On first arrival in Eeden our Ka triggered the host body's anatomy into a male or female shape—which was the reason for that uncomfortable squirming sensation I'd felt early on. Obviously this permitted us cherubs a certain limited amount of eroticism, between friends, if we felt so inclined. But not very much. The mind might be willing; the body wasn't quite up to it. Especially not in the case of boys.
I'd liked my old body; I'd been at home in it! Yet I didn't feel that this new body of mine was unbearably strange. Definitely it was the same sort as we had back home. However, for some of us cherubs— the Exotics—a body of this kind was weird. Which brings me to Yorp and his gang, whom I met while I was wandering through California.
I'd spent the previous night on a beach, unable to tear myself away from my first sight of the moonlit Pacific Ocean. How much calmer and warmer a sea this seemed than our own wild northerly waters back home! When I had laid me down to sleep on a raised bar of that wide soft strand—edged by sculpted turrets and jagged crests of rock—the ocean had lain, too, flat as a silken sheet.
When I woke to the half-light before dawn, I was soaking wet and spluttering. A flood of water was pouring around my sandy hammock, trying to drown me. A breeze had sprung up. Waves were rolling in. Worse, most of the beach had vanished. It was just as if the world had tilted, sloshing the water towards me. All of a sudden I was in the midst of the sea. How could a breeze push the water so? Maybe great monsters of the deep could reach me now! Big brothers to the little scuttling crabs I'd been watching a few hours earlier. . . .
Plodging and stumbling, I fled to what was left of the beach and found shelter by a spur of rock. I stripped off my shorts and blouse and hung them up. At least the wind was warm.
I was pacing about waiting for my clothes to dry and for the light to brighten a bit; my stomach was starting to grumble and I was wondering which way it was to the nearest service-hatch for breakfast—when I noticed this shape approaching along the strip of sand. It moved through the half-light in quick darts and dashes and crouches. It looked like a giant crab, carrying its home on its back.
"Hey!" I called, alarmed, and the crab tossed back a hood.
Visualize a seven-year-old boy. He was on the skinny side, with blue eyes and a cotton-top of blond hair. The boy wore a flappy brown bu
rnous, so that the hood enclosed his head in a dark cave, and his sandalled feet stuck out of the bottom of the cloak like scrawny claws.
The boy scuttled closer. He hunkered down, pulled in his head, drew up his feet and disappeared inside the hooded cloak entirely.
"Hullo. Been for a swim?" said his voice from within.
"Not likely! I was sleeping, and the wind shoved the sea right up the sand."
"It did what? Oh, I get it! You're from a world without a moon. Without a big one, anyhow."
"We didn't have any moon at all back home."
Somewhere inside his big hood he chuckled. His chuckle sounded like one of our croakers around the Bayou back home, vibrating its throat pouch. "A big moon drags a bulge of ocean round the world with it. It's called a tide. That's why you got wet."
"Tide." I recognized the word. Of course; my brain knew it. Alas, I hadn't thought of applying this knowledge when I lay down on that dry and mellow beach with the sea decently distant. "Damn." I felt stupid.
"I'm Yorp," said the boy. He poked his head out.
"Yaleen," said I.
We got on fine together. I soon told him I was a Flawed One. "I've met a few of those," he said. "But not nice ones, like you . . ."
Maybe that was why we got on so well. I was crippled and flawed on arrival in Eeden because the Worm had scrambled up our heritage. I did my best to act deprived, which gave me a good excuse to quiz my Cyclopedia about things I might otherwise have been expected to know in advance; though I never pushed my luck.
Yorp, on the other hand, had always expected to wind up here. His people possessed the heritage of Earth unbrokenly, and here was his goal. But I could fit into my new body without any undue awkwardness. The heritage of Earth—the foreknowledge—hadn't helped Yorp any, when it came to donning an earthly form so very different from his former body. He was hamstrung.
Yorp had run into other cherubs from his world, but they had all adjusted far more easily. This only made matters worse and more poignant for Yorp; he felt doubly a stranger. Perhaps the root trouble was that those others from his world had always been humans at heart. Yorp hadn't; he had been truly Other.
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