Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

  He crawls.

  There is a ghastly pain in his side. He fears that the tip of his intestine will break through his skin. His fingernails too respond to the pull. His bones are separating at the elbows and knees. He crawls. He crawls.

  He crawls.

  His gullet is stone. His earlobes are stone. His lips are stone. He crawls. His hands sink into the ground. He wrenches them free. He crawls. He is at the end of his resources. He will perish. He will die a slow and hideous death. The gray mantle of the sky is crushing him. He is caught between earth and air. Heavy. Heavy. Heavy. He crawls. He sees only the rough bare soil eight inches from his nose.

  He sees water.

  He has come to a pond. Smooth gray liquid awaits him. Come to me, it calls. Shed your burden. On my bosom there is no heaviness. But can he haul himself forward the last five feet? His lips touch the water. His chest scrapes the ground. He puts his cheek to the surface of the pond: it cradles him, a tough and pliable film. He wriggles, gasping, gravity’s worm, fighting for survival. Inch. Inch. Inch. Inch. Coldness against his breast. Heave. Pull. Lurch. In. In.

  He floats.

  Is this water? It seems so dense, so tangible. Heavy water? He drifts in it, free of that crushing force, his legs down deep, his arms outspread. His heart thunders. Here I am, but where am I? And how to get from here to there? The longer he bobs here, he suspects, the worse he makes things for himself, since his exposure to the power of Heavy continues all this while, the gravitational impact accumulating, and when he comes forth from the pond he may be smitten into two-dimensionality in one swift swat. But must he come forth? Perhaps there is another way. He sucks breath.

  He dives.

  He descends easily. The water accepts him. He goes down through layers of sun-dappled grayness until he finds, near the floor of the pond, a rock-lined chasm three times the width of a man. Though his lungs are bursting, he forces himself to enter it. With choppy nervous strokes he propels himself forward. He is traveling horizontally now beneath the surface of the earth. Will the tunnel prove a blind alley? Will he die of drowning in this black pocket, and is that to be preferred to dying of hypergravitation above? He swims. He swims. He swims. He sees a zone of brightness ahead. He goes up.

  He emerges.

  21

  He has come forth at the edge of paradise. The sun is green-haloed for joy; the air is sweet and tender; birds sing; plants have a happy shimmer. After Ice, after Fire, after Heavy, he can barely believe his good fortune. He sees himself sprawled on that friendly carpet of softly humming grass; he sees himself bathed by cheerful warmth; he welcomes the restoration of his driven body. He rushes forward. There is the sound of a jeering sob. He feels a jarring impact and is hurled back. Is there some invisible wall around this Eden? No. No. He is able to enter. But slowly. Very. Slowly. This too is a district of discomfort. This. Too. He has come to Slow.

  The air is transparent molasses. He is its prisoner. There will be no running here, only a solemn gliding stride. Knees pumping high, shoulders pivoting, hair floating free—it seems at first a delight. But the pleasure subtly fades. He discovers the discomfort. The busy brain buzzes, sending impatient commands, and the body cannot respond. Thwarted decrees cycle and sour in his synapses. He wishes to stoop to pick up a jeweled blossom, and he halts as abruptly as if his forehead has banged on glass. He hears a sound, and tries to turn, and must fight against the secret grip. Each motion is a challenge; each is a frustration. There is no pain in this place, but there is no freedom either.

  Cross it and be quit of it, then? Yes, certainly. But how long will the crossing take? He tries to adapt. He quells all irritable impatiences. He glides. He glides. He glides. He goes up, he comes down, gently, gently, endeavoring to offer no counterresistance to his resistive medium. Despite himself, he chafes. He frets. He wants to hammer against the liquid golden air. He forgets himself and attempts to accelerate, and gets nowhere. He boils. He sweats. All about him is grace and beauty; the trees sway softly, the sky is honey, the light is sublime. But he is held.

  And, he realizes, this place also has cumulative power.

  He is moving ever more slowly. The tensile air takes a firmer grasp. The viscosity waxes. To move in slow motion loses its last shred of ecstasy: he is frightened. Lifting his leg is now an effort. Moving an elbow is a battle. Taking a step is a war. This is no agonizing squeeze, such as he experienced in Heavy, but it is creeping immobility all the same; painlessly and gently this place is bringing him to a stop. Panic bursts. He tries to accelerate his crossing. This merely multiples his woes. The more he struggles, the more closely he is webbed. How much farther? Will he stop altogether, a living statue in this elysian field? Step. Step. Step. He strains to pull his feet free. The invisible wall is all about him. It flattens his nose. It smears his lips. He tries to make himself a wedge and cut through the glue. Perhaps walking sideways, shoulder first? It takes him minutes to turn ninety degrees. At last he is in position. He leans against the luminiferous ether. He pushes. He presses. He slows.

  He is barely moving at all now.

  Exhaustion is near. He is ragged from struggling. His lungs blaze. Muscles plink and blither in his taut cheeks. He orders himself to relax: drift forward, float, insinuate yourself through it. Yes. Easy to say. At least it is less strenuous this way, but he is not making much progress. Another approach: simply let yourself fall. Total release of muscular tension. Then pick yourself up and fall again, looping forward and forward and forward until you are out of this place. He tries it, going limp, leaning outward, letting himself tumble dreamily to the ground. It takes him several minutes to complete the drop. Now: gather your legs under your trunk and rise! But it is not so easy. He might just as well be back in Heavy, for there is an invisible shield pressing down on him. He uncoils, slowly and slowly and slowly, not forcing it, just moving with stern determination, and ultimately he is on his feet again. The maneuver has gained him perhaps a yard and has cost him perhaps four minutes. He stands in place a while, gathering strength; at least standing is no strain, not with the environment bracing him on all sides. Try it again, now? Fall and rise? His descent is even less swift. He is a feather falling through asphalt. Down. Down. Down. Lands. Draws feet up. That takes half of forever. Now rise. As before, but less swiftly. What does he look like to an unfettered observer? A drunken inchworm? He is on his feet. Possibly he has slowed to one one-hundredth of his normal rate of activity. One one-thousandth. He may pass all of eternity crossing this field. He falls again. He rises. He falls. Twilight begins; a coppery tone tinges the grass. He attempts to rise, but this time it is too much of a battle. It occurs to him that the resistance of the atmosphere may not be so great close to the ground. He will try to crawl, as in Heavy. He crawls. The resistance is no less here. He must insert himself into the vacant space just ahead. Every movement is slowed: his eyelids descend in monumental blinks, his lungs expand in marble inhalations. He crawls. He crawls. He crawls. It is night. Will the blaze of the stars melt his stasis? It will not. Silver beams dance in the air. Should the starlight not be refracted by this intractable medium? Is he not capable of detecting that refraction? Will there be an end to this passage? Oh, so slowly, so infinitely slowly, with such snaily slowness. And soon he will not be able to move at all. “Bril?” he calls hopefully. “Angelon?” His voice too is slowed; the vibrations break up into lumpy particles that fall away and lose all resonance. “Ti? Hanmer? Han Mer? Ser I Fice? Ser? I? Fice?” He is forgotten. He is engulfed by Slow.

  There is no possibility now of getting to his feet. It would take a million years. He concentrates on crawling. Right hand forward, right knee, left hand, left knee. Feet drag along behind knees. Head is propelled by shoulders. He completes one crawling step. The crooked light of dawn trickles into his eyes. Right hand forward. It is midday; fire overhead. Right knee. The sun sinks. Left hand by dusky dimness. Night and left knee. Under the stars: rest, store up strength. Right hand forward. Dawn. Noon’s blaze. Ri
ght knee. How much longer? He will have no passport for forever’s customshouse. Shadows lengthen. Left hand. Dawn. Left knee. Night. Dawn. Right hand. Twilight. Right knee. Darkness. Dawn. Left hand. Noon. Night. Dawn. Noon. Left knee. Night. Night. Night. Night. He gives up. His pace now verges on the infinitely slow. In this region of velocity the boundary between motion and not-motion is easily breached from one side, but not from the other. Day. Night. Day. Night. Try again to move, perhaps? Slow triumphs. It is a month from systole to diastole. He studies his fingers and, experimentally, lifts them. He has seen mountains do a livelier dance than that. But somehow he is able to advance a fraction of an inch, ever more slowly creeping forward. And then, miraculously, he finds himself at the farther border of Slow.

  He has reached the edge of a low bluff. The upper part of his head projects over that edge, permitting him to see a plateau beneath him. It will be a risky drop to that plateau, but what does the chance of a broken bone or two matter against the chance of coming to a complete halt of the life-processes up here? He has no choice. He must fall. Perhaps the influence of Slow will extend slightly over the margin, so that his fall will be gentled. He succeeds in wriggling another few inches forward. Now he can hook his chin over the edge. With that leverage he pulls himself on. His head dangles into the abyss. At what point will his center of balance be past the tipping point, so that his own mass will free him from Slow? He makes little progress for a while. Possibly the cumulative effect has come too close to the critical point: stasis will arrive and he will hang here everlastingly. But he gains another inch. His breast now is past the edge. He slides his right arm forward during several days and nights. And now. And now.

  He falls.

  22

  Indeed Slow tries to retain him. He slithers over the edge in no great rush, and he drops in a leisurely way, not yet restored to the time-scheme of the outer world. Thus it is that he is able to rearrange himself as he descends, jackknifing out of that disturbing head-first dive and turning so that he will land on his haunches, which he judges are better padded to take the impact than his feet. So he lands, with a smart thump on the rump. He bounces a bit and settles back.

  He determines quickly that he is unhurt.

  He gets rapidly to his feet, glorying in the sensation of swift motion.

  He waves his arms. He kicks out his legs. He jumps in the air. He shakes his head.

  There is no extreme gravity here, nor is there a mysterious retarding force, nor is the cold unbearable, nor is there furious heat, nor does he feel overtaken by unexpected senility. He is relieved to find these negative qualities absent from his present place. On the other hand, he can discover few positive qualities here. He stands on a broad, featureless plain which seems to consist entirely of a single slab of glossy gray stone, reaching to the horizon. The sky also is gray, and meets the land in such a manner that he cannot determine where one ends and the other begins. There is no vegetation. There is no sign of animal life. There are no hills. There are no valleys. There are no streams. He perceives an unbroken gray expanse, utterly without content.

  He understands that he is not yet free of the districts of discomfort. He surmises that he has come to the place known as Empty.

  “Hello?” he calls. “Hey! Anyone? Here! Where?”

  No echo responds.

  He kneels and puts his hand to the gray stone. It is neither warm nor cool. He tries to scratch it and cannot. He puts his face close, looking for imperfections, and finds none. It might as well be a seamless sheet of plastic. Rising, he looks back, trying to see the plateau on which Slow is, but it is lost in the general grayness. The sun is not apparent. There is nothing at all here. He is surprised to find even molecules of air about him in this matter-free place: why not total void? But he seems to be breathing. He has at least the illusion of it.

  He resigns himself to a traverse of Empty.

  Never has he known such isolation. He could well be the only object in the universe. Perhaps he has been caught up by the time-flux again, and swept billions of years farther along, to the era of entropy’s triumph, when grayness conquers all. Where will he go? How will he pass the time?

  It could be worse. He is not crushed here. He is not immobilized. He is in danger of neither freezing nor burning nor aging. Can he not cope with the loneliness? Is the quality of isolation here anything so different from that which he felt while keeping company with Hanmer and friends?

  He sets off, walking. Jauntily at first. Let Empty do what it can to him. Somewhere it has to end. He will stumble forth, as he did from Old and Ice and Fire and Heavy and Slow, and perhaps he will undergo some further trial, or perhaps he will rejoin his former companions, but in any event he will not suffer while he goes. After a time, though, he is not so sure. All directions seem the same here, for there are no landmarks to guide him: he could well be moving in muzzy circles, and he cannot hope for sunrise or starlight as clues. He does not even know if he is advancing or if the grayness beneath him is constantly sliding backward while he moves in place. Centuries might pass without a change here. It is a stasis worse than anything that had gripped him in Heavy or Slow, and as the time slips along in unknowable intervals, a foggy despair nibbles at his soul. His mood darkens from moment to moment. Now he knows which is the worst. In this sea of nothing he is crushed beyond even a husk. His life swims before his eyes and he sees nothing at all: no incidents, no crises, no relationships, no events, merely a stream of days and weeks and months and years, gray, featureless, empty. This is an infinite kingdom. This is a continuing city. How can he break free? He walks. He walks. He walks. He does not bother to call for help. This is Empty. This is the slough of despond.

  Nothing changes.

  He attempts to disengage his mind. He will become a mere walking machine, taking stride after stride without thinking, and perhaps he will come to the boundary eventually, and in that way he will cheat this place of its soul-sucking victory. But it is not that easy not to think. Awareness of his isolation hammers at his mind, kindling lusts and regrets and fears and hopes. He walks. Nothing changes. Does the ground slip backward? Does the sky unite with the land? This is Empty. This is Empty. This is the final death of the heart, the negation even of negation.

  He seeks ways of defeating the emptiness. He counts his steps, taking fifty paces beginning with his right foot, then bringing his feet together and starting again, fifty with his left foot. He varies the patterns of paces: eighty and sixty, seventy and fifty, ninety and forty, one hundred and thirty, thirty and one hundred. He hops on his right leg a while. He hops on his left leg. He slinks. He drops into a rigid automatic strut. He pauses and rests, squatting on the gray nothingness. He masturbates. He summons memories of his former life as he walks, imagining the faces of schoolmates, teachers, business associates, lovers. He pictures buildings and streets and parks. He lies down and tries to sleep, hoping that when he awakens he will find himself somewhere else, but he has no sleep left. He walks facing backward. He sings. He recites his catechism. He spits. He broadjumps.

  It is all no good. The empty grayness continues unbroken, and waves of miasmatic boredom swirl like smog about him. This is the night land, this is the place that is no place, this is the armpit of the universe, this is the home of the sounds of silence. Every device fails him. His mind loosens at the moorings. He is a mechanical man, taking step after step after step, getting no nearer to anything.

  “I!” he shouts.

  “You!”

  “We!”

  Not even an echo. Not even an echo.

  “Christ Jesus our Savior.”

  “When in the course of human events!”

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Silence. Silence. Silence.

  He will not be beaten. He will go on, no matter what befalls him, though the emptiness stretch from here to the universe’s nether rim. He has escaped Old and Ice and Fire and Heavy and Slow, and he will escape Empty also, if he must walk a million years through the clingin
g murk.

  “Clay!” he calls.

  “Father! Son! Holy Ghost!”

  “Hanmer! Ninameen! Ti!”

  His words are swallowed by the air. His bravest roars slide through the fabric of nothingness and trickle away. Yet he continues to shout. And stamp his feet. And clap his hands. And shake his fists. And walk. And walk. And walk. His mood wavers. There are moments when he is so burdened with despair that he sinks to his knees, limply despondent, and closes his eyes, and waits for the time of last things to overtake him. But in other moments he knows that the end of his sufferings lies just ahead, if he will only keep his courage high and march pluckily onward: he is the representative of man in these latter days, and must not fail the high trust placed in him. He walks on, searching for signs. Is that a star on the horizon? No. No. Is that a deepening of the texture of the grayness in some places? Perhaps. Is that a darkness settling in? It seems to be. If this place has the capacity to change at all, it has the capacity to end. He will persevere. Already the quality of the grayness seems definitely to have altered. He must have passed some boundary unawares. The reward of faith: delivered from Empty. His joy in his escape is tempered, though, by a difficulty in perceiving his present surroundings. It is terribly dark here. He walks on and on, neither stumbling into trees or boulders nor sensing any change in the smoothness underfoot, and the darkness deepens until it becomes absolute; he begins to wonder if he has truly left Empty behind, or if this merely is Empty’s night, coming down after an infinite day. As he continues he starts to understand what has happened. In truth he has made his way out of Empty, but this exercise of his courage and determination has brought him only to the neighboring territory, which is Dark, no better and probably much worse. Here he has the absence of all those things that were absent from Empty, and he has also the absence of light, so that he mourns even the loss of the grayness. Now he tastes true hopelessness. Empty was a garden of delights next to Dark.