“The green birds are dying,” said Sanza, putting aside a report she had been reading.
“Oh?” said Jarry.
“Apparently they’ve done all the adapting they’re able to,” she told him.
“Pity,” said Jarry.
“It seems less than a year since we came here. Actually, it’s a thousand.”
“Time flies,” said Jarry.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Just afraid.”
“Why?”
“Living the way we’ve been living, I guess. Leaving little pieces of ourselves in different centuries. Just a few months ago, as my memory works, this place was a desert. Now it’s an ice field. Chasms open and close. Canyons appear and disappear. Rivers dry up and new ones spring forth. Everything seems so very transitory. Things look solid, but I’m getting afraid to touch things now. They might go away. They might turn into smoke, and my hand will keep on reaching through the smoke and touch—something… God, maybe. Or worse yet, maybe not. No one really knows what it will be like here when we’ve finished. We’re traveling toward an unknown land and it’s too late to go back. We’re moving through a dream, heading toward an idea… Sometimes I miss my cell… and all the little machines that took care of me there. Maybe I can’t adapt. Maybe I’m like the green bird… “
“No, Sanza. You’re not. We’re real. No matter what happens out there, we will last. Everything is changing because we want it to change. We’re stronger than the world, and well squeeze it and paint it and poke holes in it until we’ve made it exactly the way we want it. Then we’ll take it and cover it with cities and children. You want to see God? Go look in the mirror. God has pointed ears and green eyes. He is covered with soft gray fur. When He raises His hand there is webbing between His fingers.”
“It is good that you are strong, Jarry.”
“Let’s get out the power sled and go for a ride.”
“All right.”
Up and down, that day, they drove through Deadland, where the dark stones stood like clouds in another sky.
It was twelve and a half hundred years.
Now they could breathe without respirators, for a short time.
Now they could bear the temperature, for a short time.
Now all the green birds were dead.
Now a strange and troubling thing began.
The bipeds came by night, made markings upon the snow, left dead animals in the midst of them. This happened now with much more frequency than it had in the past. They came long distances to do it, many of them with fur which was not their own upon their shoulders.
Jarry searched through the history files for all the reports on the creatures.
“This one speaks of lights in the forest,” he said. “Station Seven.”
“What…?”
“Fire,” he said. “What if they’ve discovered fire?”
“Then they’re not really beasts!”
“But they were!”
“They wear clothing now. They make some sort of sacrifice to our machines. They’re not beasts any longer.”
“How could it have happened?”
“How do you think? We did it. Perhaps they would have remained stupid—animals—if we had not come along and forced them to get smart in order to go on living. We’ve accelerated their evolution. They had to adapt or die, and they adapted.”
“D’you think it would have happened if we hadn’t come along?” he asked.
“Maybe—some day. Maybe not, too.” Jarry moved to the window, stared out across Deadland. “I have to find out,” he said. “If they are intelligent, if they are-human, like us,” he said, then laughed, “then we must consider their ways.”
“What do you propose?”
“Locate some of the creatures. See whether we can communicate with them.”
“Hasn’t it been tried?”
“Yes.”
“What were the results?”
“Mixed. Some claim they have considerable understanding. Others place them far below the threshold where humanity begins.”
“We may be doing a terrible thing,” she said. “Creating men, then destroying them. Once, when I was feeling low, you told me that we were the gods of this world, that ours was the power to shape and to break. Ours is the power to shape and break, but I don’t feel especially divine. What can we do? They have come this far, but do you think they can bear the change that will take us the rest of the way? What if they are like the green birds? What if they’ve adapted as fast and as far as they can and it is not sufficient? What would a god do?”
“Whatever he wished,” said Jarry.
That day, they cruised over Deadland in the flier, but the only signs of life they saw were each other. They continued to search in the days that followed, but they did not meet with success.
Under the purple of morning, however, two weeks later, it happened.
“They’ve been here,” said Sanza.
Jarry moved to the front of the installation and stared out.
The snow was broken in several places, inscribed with the lines he had seen before, about the form of a small, dead beast.
“They can’t have gone very far,” he said.
“No.”
“We’ll search in the sled.”
Now over the snow and out, across the land called Dead they went, Sanza driving and Jarry peering at the lines of footmarks in the blue.
They cruised through the occurring morning, hinting of fire and violet, and the wind went past them like a river, and all about them there came sounds like the cracking of ice, the trembling of tin, the snapping of steel strands. The bluefrested stones stood like frozen music, and the long shadow of their sled, black as ink, raced on ahead of them. A shower of hailstones drumming upon the roof of their vehicle like a sudden visitation of demon dancers, as suddenly was gone. Deadland sloped downward, slanted up again.
Jarry placed his hand upon Sanza’s shoulder.
“Ahead!”
She nodded, began to brake the sled.
They had it at bay. They were using clubs and long poles which looked to have fire-hardened points. They threw stones. They threw pieces of ice.
Then they backed away and it killed them as they went.
The Catforms had called it a bear because it was big and shaggy and could rise up onto its hind legs…
This one was about three and a half meters in length, was covered with bluish fur and had a thin, hairless snout like the business end of a pair of pliers.
Five of the little creatures lay still in the snow. Each time that it swung a paw and connected, another one fell.
Jarry removed the pistol from its compartment and checked the charge.
“Cruise by slowly,” he told her. “I’m going to try to burn it about the head.”
His first shot missed, scoring the boulder at its back. His second singed the fur of its neck. He leapt down from the sled then, as they came abreast of the beast, thumbed the power control up to maximum, and fired the entire charge into its breast, point-blank.
The bear stiffened, swayed, fell, a gaping wound upon it, front to back.
Jarry turned and regarded the little creatures. They stared up at him.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Jarry. I dub thee Redforms—”
He was knocked from his feet by a blow from behind.
He rolled across the snow, lights dancing before his eyes, his left arm and shoulder afire with pain.
A second bear had emerged from the forest of stone.
He drew his long hunting knife with his right hand and climbed back to his feet.
As the creature lunged, he moved with the catspeed of his kind, thrusting upward, burying his knife to the hilt in its throat.
A shudder ran through it, but it cuffed him and he fell once again, the blade torn from his grasp.
The Redforms threw more stones, rushed toward it with their pointed sticks.
Then there was a thud and a crunching sound, and it rose up into the air and came down on top of him.
He awakened.
He lay on his back, hurting, and everything he looked at seemed to be pulsing, as if about to explode.
How much time had passed, he did not know.
Either he or the bear had been moved.
The little creatures crouched, watching.
Some watched the bear. Some watched him.
Some watched the broken sled…
The broken sled…
He struggled to his feet.
The Redforms drew back.
He crossed to the sled and looked inside.
He knew she was dead when he saw the angle of her neck. But he did all the things a person does to be sure, anyway, before he would let himself believe it.
She had delivered the deathblow, crashing the sled into the creature, breaking its back. It had broken the sled. Herself, also.
He leaned against the wreckage, composed his first prayer, then removed her body.
The Redforms watched.
He lifted her in his arms and began walking, back toward the installation, across Deadland.
The Redforms continued to watch as he went, except for the one with the strangely high brow-ridge, who studied instead the knife that protruded from the shaggy and steaming throat of the beast.
Jarry asked the awakened executives of December: “What should we do?”
“She is the first of our race to die on this world,” said Yan Turl, Vice President.
“There is no tradition,” said Selda Kein, Secretary. “Shall we establish one?”
“I don’t know,” said Jarry. “I don’t know what is right to do.”
“Burial or cremation seem to be the main choices. Which would you prefer?”
“I don’t—No, not the ground. Give her back to me. Give me a large flier… I’ll burn her.”
“Then let us construct a chapel.”
“No. It is a thing I must do in my own way. I’d rather do it alone.”
“As you wish. Draw what equipment you need, and be about it.”
“Please send someone else to keep the Deadland installation. I wish to sleep again when I have finished this thing—until the next cycle.”
“Very well, Jarry. We are sorry.”
“Yes—we are.”
Jarry nodded, gestured, turned, departed.
Thus are the heavier lines of life sometimes drawn.
At the southeastern edge of Deadland there was a blue mountain. It stood to slightly over three thousand meters in height. When approached from the northwest, it gave the appearance of being a frozen wave in a sea too vast to imagine. Purple clouds rent themselves upon its peak. No living thing was to be found on its slopes. It had no name, save that which Jarry Dark gave it.
He anchored the flier.
He carried her body to the highest point to which a body might be carried.
He placed her there, dressed in her finest garments, a wide scarf concealing the angle of her neck, a dark veil covering her emptied features.
He was about to try a prayer when the hail began to fall. Like thrown rocks, the chunks of blue ice came down upon him, upon her.
“God damn you!” he cried and he raced back to the flier.
He climbed into the air, circled.
Her garments were flapping in the wind. The hail was a blue, beaded curtain that separated them from all but these final caresses: fire aflow from ice to ice, from clay aflow immortally through guns.
He squeezed the trigger and a doorway into the sun opened in the side of the mountain that had been nameless. She vanished within it, and he widened the doorway until he had lowered the mountain.
Then he climbed upward into the cloud, attacking the storm until his guns were empty.
He circled then above the molten mesa, there at the southeastern edge of Deadland.
He circled above the first pyre this world had seen.
Then he departed, to sleep for a season in silence the sleep of ice and of stone, to inherit the new Alyonal. There is no dreaming in that sleep.
Fifteen centuries. Almost half the Wait. Two hundred words or less… Picture—
… Nineteen mighty rivers flowing, but the black seas rippling violet now.
… No shallow iodine-colored forests. Mighty shag-barked barrel trees instead, orange and lime and black and tall across the land.
… Great ranges of mountains in the place of hills brown, yellow, white, lavender. Black corkscrews of smoke unwinding from smoldering cones.
… Flowers, whose roots explore the soil twenty meters beneath their mustard petals, unfolded amidst the blue frost and the stones.
… Blind burrowers burrowing deeper; offal-eating murk-beasts now showing formidable incisors and great rows of ridged molars; giant caterpillars growing smaller but looking larger because of increasing coats.
… The contours of valleys still like the torsos of women, flowing and rolling, or perhaps like instruments of music.
… Gone much windblasted stone, but ever the frost.
… Sounds in the morning as always, harsh, brittle, metallic.
They were sure they were halfway to heaven.
Picture that.
The Deadland log told him as much as he really needed to know. But he read back through the old reports, also.
Then he mixed himself a drink and stared out the third floor window.
“… Will die,” he said, then finished his drink, outfitted himself, and abandoned his post.
It was three days before he found a camp.
He landed the flier at a distance and approached on foot. He was far to the south of Deadland, where the air was warmer and caused him to feel constantly short of breath.
They were wearing animal skins—skins which had been cut for a better fit and greater protection, skins which were tied about them. He counted sixteen lean-to arrangements and three campfires. He flinched as he regarded the fires, but he continued to advance.
When they saw him, all their little noises stopped, a brief cry went up, and then there was silence.
He entered the camp.
The creatures stood unmoving about him. He heard some bustling within the large lean-to at the end of the clearing.
He walked about the camp.
A slab of dried meat hung from the center of a tripod of poles.
Several long spears stood before each dwelling place. He advanced and studied one. A stone which had been flaked into a leaf-shaped spearhead was affixed to its end.
There was the outline of a cat carved upon a block of wood…
He heard a footfall and turned.
One of the Redforms moved slowly toward him. It appeared older than the others. Its shoulders sloped; as it opened its mouth to make a series of popping noises, he saw that some of its teeth were missing; its hair was grizzled and thin. It bore something in its hands, but Jarry’s attention was drawn to the hands themselves.
Each hand bore an opposing digit.
He looked about him quickly, studying the hands of the others. All of them seemed to have thumbs. He studied their appearance more closely.
They now had foreheads.
He returned his attention to the old Redform.
It placed something at his feet, and then it backed away from him.
He looked down.
A chunk of dried meat and a piece of fruit lay upon a broad leaf.
He picked up the meat, closed his eyes, bit off a piece, chewed and swallowed. He wrapped the rest in the leaf and placed it in the side pocket of his pack.
He extended his hand and the Redform drew back.
He lowered his hand, unrolled the blanket he had carried with him and spread it upon the ground. He seated himself, pointed to the Redform, then indicated a position across from him at the other end of the blanket.
The creature hesitated, then advanced and seated itself.
“We are going to learn to talk with one
another,” he said slowly. Then he placed his hand upon his breast and said, “Jarry.”
Jarry stood before the reawakened executives of December.
“They are intelligent,” he told them. “It’s all in my report.”
“So?” asked Yan Turl.
“I don’t think they will be able to adapt. They have come very far, very rapidly. But I don’t think they can go much further. I don’t think they can make it all the way.”
“Are you a biologist, an ecologist, a chemist?”
“No.”
“Then on what do you base your opinion?”
“I observed them at close range for six weeks.”
“Then it’s only a feeling you have…?”
“You know there are no experts on a thing like this. It’s never happened before.”
“Granting their intelligence—granting even that what you have said concerning their adaptability is correct—what do you suggest we do about it?”
“Slow down the change. Give them a better chance. If they can’t make it the rest of the way, then stop short of our goal. It’s already livable here. We can adapt the rest of the way.”
“Slow it down? How much?”
“Supposing we took another seven or eight thousand years?”
“Impossible!”
“Entirely!”
“Too much!”
“Why?”
“Because everyone stands a three-month watch every two hundred fifty years. That’s one year of personal time for every thousand. You’re asking for too much of everyone’s time.”
“But the life of an entire race may be at stake!”
“You do not know for certain.”
“No, I don’t. But do you feel it is something to take a chance with?”
“Do you want to put it to an executive vote?”
“No—I can see that I’ll lose. I want to put it before the entire membership.”
“Impossible. They’re all asleep.”
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth Page 6