Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

  Each of these miracles rushes across the plain as though if it can only get away from the place of its creation swiftly enough it will be permitted to survive. But each meets the same fate as it variously creeps, crawls, hops, rolls, runs, jumps, slides, slithers, tumbles, dances, or leaps out of the steaming pool. It succeeds in covering perhaps half a mile; then it perishes, turning transparent and speedily losing substance, vanishing within moments. The primordial Chaos calls its creatures back. Again and again some particularly dynamic monstrosity strives to escape its doom by streaking madly across the plain. No use. No use. Reality bleeds out of each; the vigorous became as insubstantial as the sluggish. Clay is swept with pity at the sight, for while some of the things that Chaos spawns are hideous, many are charming, elegant, graceful, delicate, and lovely, and he has hardly begun to appreciate their subtle beauties when they are gone.

  The Skimmers stand arm in arm, watching Chaos’s prodigality. Clay is in the group, with Ninameen (female) and Hanmer (male) flanking him. No one speaks. High above them, the wound in the mountain bubbles with boiling fertility. He remembers once having seen photographs taken by oceanographers of a newly scooped netful of plankton: a billion tiny jeweled nightmares spilling forth, glistening little beasts with many eyes and many claws and angry bristling tails, aglow with every stripe of the spectrum during their brief fitful moment of life on deck, then fading, sagging, turning to twitching slime. So here, on a larger scale. The outrageous fecundity of Chaos delights and appalls him. To what purpose, all these vanishing wonders? From what source, this parade of short-winded splendors? And what lies within the mountain yet unseen, if these are the ones that emerge?

  “How long will this continue?” he asks finally.

  “Forever,” says Hanmer. “Unless someone closes the mountain.”

  “And who would do that?” Ninameen asks, laughing.

  “Where does everything come from?”

  “There are rivers under the world,” says Hanmer. “This one has broken out. It is the fifth time such a thing has happened in our lifetimes.”

  “Few of the other openings remain productive,” Ti points out. “The channels change.”

  “The channels change,” Hanmer agrees.

  “But if the channels change,” says Clay helplessly, “why do you tell me that this flow will continue forever?”

  The Skimmers giggle. An elephantine form waddles out of the pool and disappears. Six skulls appear. Two bloody things, dog-shaped and immense, cavort and howl and leap high, and lose dimensionality before they touch ground again. A platoon of glittering insects emerges, moving toward oblivion in flawless formation. A grinning face is visible in a towering burst of gray steam. There is no end to it. Night comes and the whole plain glows. And Chaos still gushes.

  26

  He senses a spiritual slippage of his position here. Imperceptibly the Skimmers are losing interest in him. Perhaps he bores them, perhaps their attention-span has reached its limit; whyever, they have withdrawn some of their love. Several times he finds himself suspecting that they actually fear him. Or dislike. But he can point to no special incident.

  It is harder than ever to engage them in sustained conversation. Topics melt and blend; themes disappear in midthought; laughter and handsprings too often foreclose formal sequences of information-exchange. He still makes attempts to learn things from them, but less often.

  “Will I ever return to my own time?”

  “What became of the spheroid?”

  “How are new Skimmers created?”

  “Where is the home of Wrong? Who or what is she?”

  “Why have I been brought here?”

  “When do you do the Shaping of the Sky?”

  “How old is the world?”

  “Where is the moon?”

  “Why was I allowed to suffer in the districts of discomfort?”

  “Will I ever sleep again?”

  “Am I dreaming you?”

  “Are you dreaming me?”

  27

  One afternoon they do the Shaping of the Sky, and they do not tell him until later. It has come to that, now. They do not need his participation. They no longer bother to share their important things with him.

  He suspects, while it is taking place, that something unusual must be happening. They are camped along the coast of a southern sea: the beach here consists of fine gray pebbles, coated with the pale green bodies of innumerable jellyfish cast up by the tides. He has always loved the sea. Seeing the Skimmers drawing together for some mysterious unspoken conversation, he goes wading, delicately picking his way over the dead coelenterates and wandering out hipdeep into the warm water. Weedy strands sprout from the powdery bottom; shining fish dart past him. He relishes the feel of the gentle waves against his nakedness. He swims. He dives, and is surprised at how long he can remain submerged. He floats, kicking, letting the sun stroke his cheeks.

  There should be a mermaid.

  He thinks he can see her approaching. Woman to the waist, fish below. Long golden hair, trailing to pale shoulders. White breasts, firm, full, red-tipped. Fiery green scales. Supple tapering tail, strong, sleek, terminating in agile active fins. She comes to him in a lashing of flukes and bobs beside him. “Yes,” he says. “An inevitable result of the fractioning of the human form. Nature follows art. What a lovely thing you are!”

  She smiles. She pouts. She kisses him. She puts his hands to her breasts. Mammal above, fish below.

  “Love me,” she says, voice like the sound of seashells.

  “But how? Where’s the harbor?” He explores her scales. She laughs. Even a fish has sexual organs. She gives him no aid; his search is in vain. If he were to clasp her, he decides, he would abrade himself. It is some consolation. He releases her. She remains beside him.

  “Are there many like you?” he asks. “A nation in the sea? Are you an ancient form? Evolved naturally, or by means of genetic manipulation?”

  “I am not like the others you know,” she tells him.

  “In what way?”

  “I am unreal,” she says.

  He will not accept that. He reaches for her breasts. But she is gone before he touches her. He dives, eyes staring through the sparkling green water, and cannot find her.

  When he returns to the surface, he becomes aware that some disturbance has begun. The disappearance of the mermaid, the loss of that grace, that innocence, still clouds his soul with ebbing wonder; but once he admits the end of the vision, he sees more clearly what is happening all about. Far out to sea a cluster of turquoise waterspouts stands on the horizon, penetrating the clear air. They whirl; they grow; they shrink; they move apart and drift back together; they hurl a spray of fishes and weeds toward the land. Turning, facing shore, he sees the canopy of the sky undergoing quick shallow undulations, its belly bouncing earthward and instantly rebounding. Harsh music chimes and groans: the scraping of huge crickets, the pounding of heavy drums. The sun has undergone a spectral shift and yields a distinctly greenish light, and some of the brighter stars are visible. From the south comes a series of swift unresonant explosions: pop pop pop pop, as of sudden compressions and decompressions. The earth trembles. Then the music is gone, the waterspouts fall back into the sea, the sun grows yellow, the stars disappear, the sky becomes rigid, the explosion ends. The event is over, having lasted hardly three minutes, and, so far as he can see, nothing has been altered by that brief magical interval of instability.

  He hurries to shore.

  The six Skimmers sprawl on a grass-tufted dune a hundred yards inland. They look exhausted, limp, like wax mannequins that have come too close to the flame. They all seem to be in some intermediate sexual form—some with breasts and the scrotal bulge, some with wiry male bodies and the pseudovaginal slit, but none clearly in this camp or in that. Nor can he readily tell one from another. Their faces are identical. He realizes that he has been distinguishing Hanmer from Ninameen, Angelon from Ti, Bril from Serifice, more by the quality of the spiri
t they radiate than by any individuality of feature, and now they radiate nothing he can detect. It is possible that these are not his Skimmers at all, but some other group entirely. He is hesitant as he nears them. When his shadow falls on two of them, he draws back, abashed, as though intruding. For a long while he stands beside them. Their eyes are open; but do they see him?

  At length he says, fearfully, “Hammer? Serifice? Nina—”

  “—meen,” she finishes, stirring lazily. “Did you have a good swim?”

  “Strange. Did you see—things that happened?”

  “Such as?” The voice is Hanmer’s.

  “The waterspouts. The drums. The sun. The stars.”

  “Oh, that. Nothing much.”

  “What was it, though?”

  “Side effects.” A yawn. Rolling over; slim back turned to the sun. Clay stands frozen, arms dangling foolishly. Side effects? “Ninameen?” he says. “Ti?”

  “Are you unhappy?” one of them asks.

  “Puzzled.”

  “Yes?”

  “The waterspouts. The drums. The sun. The stars.”

  “These things happen. We completed the cycle.”

  “The cycle?”

  “The fifth rite. The Shaping of the Sky.”

  “Done?”

  “Done, and very nicely. And now we rest.” The voice is Hanmer’s. “Come lie beside us. Rest. Rest. Rest. The cycle is complete.”

  28

  They give him no satisfying answers. They sink back into their stupor. He feels deserted and betrayed. They had let him share in the other four rites; why not this? They have clipped an experience from his life. And they are bored with him. He steps back, angry and ashamed. He has missed something of climactic importance, he believes. He has, perhaps, lost his chance of seizing the key that opens the box that holds the answers to his riddles. And they do not care. And they do not care.

  Irritated, he skips up the side of the dune and begins walking swiftly inland.

  The sand twists under his feet, slowing him. He notices, also, little highways on the ground, the tracks of flat gray crawling creatures that look something like scorpions. They pay no attention to him, and several times, crossing the path of one, he comes close to treading on it. He is concerned by this: he does not want to step on anything angry. But soon the sand gives way to coarse reddish loam, tufted by fleshy-looking blue plants, and he sees the crawling things no longer.

  He wonders where he will go.

  He is not sure yet whether his leaving the Skimmers represents a passing pique or a permanent break. His annoyance with them may ebb; after all, they have given him some extraordinary moments. Possibly he soon will want to return to them. On the other hand, he does not wish to force himself on people who find him dull. He may try to assert his independence. He does not seem to need food or shelter in this world, and he imagines that he can find other companions whenever solitary wandering loses its charm. He believes that he has no hope of returning ever to his own era.

  Through most of the morning, as he walks on through a hot dry, region of flat wastes and inquisitive purple land-snails, he toys with this notion of surviving on his own. The more he considers it, the more attractive it seems to him. Yes. He will explore every continent. He will search for underground cities dating from epochs not long after his. He will try to gather artifacts and other curios of the sons of man. He will test such new powers as he may have acquired under this bloated sun. He will, maybe, try to manufacture a sort of paper, and set down a memoir of his adventure, both for his own enlightenment and to inform others of his kind who may be blown this way. He will converse with such Breathers, Eaters, Destroyers, Awaiters, and Skimmers as he meets, and the Interceders if he happens to find them, and also any beings of prior eras cast up here by the whims of the time-flux: goat-men, spheroids, tunnel-dwellers, and such. A kind of ecstasy comes over him as he savors the freedoms of this intended way of life. Yes! Yes! Why not? The joy of it swells like a balloon in his soul, and, balloon-like, it explodes abruptly, sending him reeling to the ground in shock and loneliness.

  He regrets leaving the Skimmers.

  He must get back to them and ask them to accept him once more.

  Strangely confused, he remains where he is, crouching, knees and elbows in the dirt, rump up, eyes tracking a great globular snail that is crossing in front of him. Inertia knees his back. Up: turn around, find your friends. Slowly he rises. The soft hot breeze lifts the topsoil, coating his sweaty skin. He runs, heedless of the snails all about. Where is the sea? Where are the Skimmers? He follows the sun. Soil gives way to sand, snails to scorpions. He hears the surf. He mounts the dunes. This is the place. He sees his tracks. He remembers Ninameen’s coltish gaiety, Hanmer’s solemn helpfulness, Serifice’s mystic depths, Ti’s beauty, Angelon’s alertness, Bril’s tenderness. How could he have left them? They are his friends. And more than that: they are part of him, and he, he hopes, part of them. Well on the way to sevenness. We have shared so much. My momentary anger. Childish. My brothers, my sisters: a little careless sometimes, but it is only to be expected; there’s such a gulf of time between us. Could I understand a Cro-Magnon’s feelings? Could he interpret a tenth of the things I say? But no reason to split because of that. We must be loving. We must be close.

  He comes over the last dune, and sees the shore, and finds the marks where the Skimmers had been lying, but he does not see them.

  “Hanmer? Serifice? Ti?”

  They are nowhere about.

  He shouts. He waves. He runs along the beach. He searches for footprints. No use, no use, no use. They have not left a trail. Soaring up, blazing through the stratosphere, off to Saturn in a single rush, perhaps. Forgetting him. Serves him right. He calls their names without hope. He rolls desperately in the sand. He sprints into the water, hoping to find his mermaid, at least. No one. Nothing. Abandoned. Alone.

  Your own fault. But now?

  He will trek. The Skimmers have rescued him from loneliness before; they may again. Meanwhile he will go his way, and regret his impulsive bolting, and hope. And hope. Once more he walks inland, this time at an angle to his earlier path, for that wasteland of snails was not pleasing to him. If he ever finds his Skimmers again, he resolves, he will never willingly leave their side. The land here is much like the other place, though not quite so hot; a row of low hills intercepts the brunt of the dry wind. There are snails here too, but of a different species, green with crimson whorls. They leave glistening fiery tracks on the bare ground. More than once, accidentally, he steps on one. These snails crack with a sinister hissing sound that leaves him desolate with shame. He studies his footing, placing each step with care, and becomes so obsessed with avoiding the snails that he fails to notice changes in the character of his surroundings. Some trees have appeared: conical snub-topped ones, short, that seem like hybrids of date palms and toadstools. There are a few feeble streams. And, he discovers, he is approaching someone’s house.

  House?

  Since his awakening he has not seen such a thing. But plainly this is a fraud or an illusion, for what he beholds is a two-story brick structure in the 1940 style, with a roof of gray slate shingles and a green holiday wreath hanging on the knocker of the front door. The path that leads to it is neatly paved, and there is a dark asphalted driveway on the left side of the house, although Clay sees neither a garage nor an automobile. The windows are shielded by frilly white draperies. A windowbox in which geraniums are growing sits on one of the second-floor sills.

  He laughs. He doubts very much that of all the structures of the former eras of mankind, this house alone would be the one to come intact through myriads of millennia. It is a prank, then. But whose? “Ninameen?” he asks, in hope. “Ti?”

  The front door opens and a woman emerges.

  Of his species. Young, but past her true youth. Naked. Short dark hair, adequate breasts, a little wide in the hips; unusually good legs. An easy smile; even teeth. Alert, sympathetic eyes. A minor skin
blemish here and there. Not a fantasy creature, but a real woman, imperfect, attractive, promising reasonable delights. She looks just a trifle ill at ease in her nudity, but gives the impression that it will not matter much to her once she knows him somewhat better. He pauses a dozen yards from her door.

  “Hello,” she says. “Glad to see you.”

  He moistens his lips. He feels odd about being naked, too. “I didn’t expect to find a house out here.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t.”

  “Where’d it come from?”

  She shrugs. “It was here,” she says. “I came along walking, just as you did, and I found it. Nice and cozy. I suppose they made it for me so I’d feel at home. I mean, I don’t really believe that this is an actual house left over from our time, that just happened to be sitting here umpteen million years. Do you?”

  He grins. He likes her open manner. She is leaning against the frame of the door, no longer seeming troubled about her bareness in any way; one hand is jauntily perched on her hip. He sees her eyes pass over him in appraisal. He says, “No. I didn’t believe for a minute that the house was genuine. The question now is whether you are.”

  “Don’t I look genuine?”

  “So does the house,” he says. “Where’d you come from?”