King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  19

  MEETINGS IN MARA ZION

  “AFTER ALL THIS TIME,” MURMURED AFAH, “WE still haven’t been able to shake them off. They’ve been searching for us ever since we left the Home Planet. And now we’ve inflicted them on someone else. Isn’t it possible for us ever to escape the consequences of our own actions? Was the Exodus all a mistake?”

  Fang had also been searching his memory lobe. “It seems to me we developed a way of life that wasn’t compatible with the Tin Mothers, and we made the choice to go a different route. We weren’t running away. The Exodus was a glorious adventure.”

  Fortunately it was too dark for Fang to see the look of irritation that Afah shot in his direction. “Agni alone knows how many worlds they’ve contaminated; how many intelligent life-forms have fallen victim to their stranglehold!”

  “It’s not that bad, really.” Marc broke into the conversation, as it was going rapidly downhill. “The saviors have never done anyone any harm. Our history lessons tell us they arrived peacefully and immediately set about helping people. Unfortunately we sold out to them in exchange for an easy life.”

  “You see, Fang?” said Afah. “We must get back to the spacehopper and report our shame to the bat.”

  Fang decided it was time to make a stand. “You can if you like. I’m staying, and so is the Princess. And I’m sure the Miggot will. I refuse to set foot on that bat again. I’ve wasted thirty thousand years of my life in there. You can go back and send our children down, and anyone else who wants to come.”

  Afah said, “You cannot remain on a planet already inhabited by an intelligent life-form. Such is our code, Fang.”

  “Bugger the code!” shouted the Miggot.

  The Princess said, “We’re not going.”

  “Shut up, all of you!” shouted Sally. “Stop arguing, or I’ll stamp on you—and then none of you will be going anywhere!” Fang watched in horror as she snatched Afah up. “Let’s talk about something useful for a change. You say your people built the saviors, or Tin Mothers, or whatever the hell they are. All right. So get this Mother to explain where Marc’s people and mine came from, and why our racial history was edited out of their lessons!”

  Afah had begun to kick, but it soon occurred to him that this was even more undignified than not kicking. Motionless and rigid, he said, “It is the least I can do, when I think of the trouble my people have brought to your world. Please put me down.”

  Sally complied. The moon chose that moment to emerge from behind a heavy bank of clouds, casting a silvery glow over the sea. Fang began to fidget with impatience. He was sure the history of Sally’s people was very important to them, but it had little relationship to the gnomes and their problems. She was waiting for Afah to speak, impatient herself, waggling her arms in a curious way. The two giants were quite different in build. Sally was slender, with queer arms; whereas Marc was built like a huge gnome, squat and muscular. Fang regarded Sally’s arms.

  He could see feathers there.

  His heart thudding, he looked again at her face. Now, in the moonlight, he could see her features more clearly, and he recognized them.

  She was the creature of his dreams. The girl with wings. Fascinated, he stared openly. Perhaps she was important, after all. He wished Nyneve was there; then suddenly, in a moment of deep sorrow, remembered that thirty thousand years had passed.

  “Miggot,” he whispered.

  But the Miggot’s attention was elsewhere. “The moon,” he whispered back.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  Fang looked. There, to the right of the hard-edged disc, was another outline, fainter but unmistakable. …

  Misty Moon was back.

  “Miggot!” he squeaked.

  “Don’t say anything. That may come in useful.”

  Fang turned his attention to Afah, who was staring down into the face of the Tin Mother. “Our people haven’t met for a long time,” said the kikihuahua. “The first thing you can do, is explain the origin of these humanoid creatures.”

  “It is not in their best interests to know.”

  “But I say it is, and I am your master.”

  “Of course. During an age of human exploration of space,” began the Tin Mother unhesitatingly, “Mankind felt it necessary to create adaptations of his own form for use on worlds with special characteristics. When we arrived here, there were two new races still awaiting shipment, known colloquially as the Swingers and the Wingers.

  “We were duty-bound to discourage further space exploration—the dangers are too well known for me to go into that. The new races were not particularly well designed for life on Earth, so we separated them from normal humans, whose life spans we had prolonged indefinitely. The kindest course of action was to place the Swingers and Wingers on reservations until they became extinct. This we did.”

  There was a long silence. Sally finally asked in a small voice, “What world was I designed for?”

  “A low-gravity planet.”

  “Would I have been able to fly?”

  “Yes. You understand why we could not tell you all this without direct orders. It would have been demoralizing for your people.”

  “Well,” said Marc shakily, “now that we know, what shall we do?”

  “Command the Tin Mothers to send us to the worlds we were designed for, of course.”

  “The technology is not readily available,” said the Tin Mother. “The True Humans have lost interest in science. They have become pure minds. Their machines decayed long ago. It would take much more than your expected life span to regain the ability to leave Earth’s gravitational field.”

  Sally said to Afah, “You can take us in your ship.”

  “I’m afraid not. Our genetic structure is designed to withstand the molecular expansion necessary to leave Earth on the spacehopper. Yours is not. You would die.”

  “Oh, God!” cried Sally. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Marc watched her sadly. He could see no end to her despair. “The kikihuahuas must help us get rid of the Tin Mothers,” he said. “It’s the least they can do. And then we must all help the True Humans do the same thing. And then we must all start rebuilding our civilization. If we can’t go to the worlds we were designed for, at least our descendants will be able to.”

  There was a long silence while Afah digested this. To the gnomes, the reply was obvious. But Afah had to take many other considerations into account, particularly the suggestion that the humans would redevelop powered space travel.

  In the end he sighed and said, “Yes, we will help you.”

  Sally uttered a scream of delight, bent down, and hugged him. “You may look like a monkey, Afah, but your heart’s in the right place. And these other three are just like little humans. You really are gnomes, aren’t you! Isn’t this fun, Marc? I can’t wait to tell my people!”

  “An awful lot of people like the Tin Mothers,” Marc warned her. “And nearly all the True Humans do, or they wouldn’t stay in the dome. This isn’t going to be easy, Sally.”

  Optimism reigned elsewhere, however, and the group began to climb the rope back to the cliff top. “First we should show them the man in the rock,” said Sally. “It’s on the way home. If the gnomes really were here long ago, they might have some ideas about him.”

  Amazed and scared, they stared at the rock in the flickering light of a torch.

  “He’s gone,” said Marc. “He was right there, and now he’s not. This looks just like ordinary rock now.”

  “He woke up and broke out,” said Sally. “He broke out and now he’s roaming the forest, neither alive nor dead, bellowing with despair.”

  “We’d have heard him,” said Marc. “And he’d have left a hole in the rock.”

  “Perhaps he was a prince under a spell,” suggested Sally. “Dreaming in there like True Humans dream in the dome. Waiting to be awakened by the gaze of a beautiful woman. And when I looked at him, he took his place in his magic kingdom.”r />
  “Perhaps it was all a trick of the light,” ventured the Princess. “It is difficult to see in here.”

  “He was there,” Sally insisted. “I saw him.”

  “For God’s sake, stop gawking at that rock like a crowd of idiots,” snapped the Miggot, “and let’s get out of here. Caves are unsavory places. They can turn a gnome weird. My Cousin Hal used to live in a cave.”

  Fang was silent. He’d been suffering the most aching nostalgia. There had been the climb down from the cliff to the beach and into the forest, where nothing seemed to have changed. The animal noises were the same, and the smell of leaf mold awakened familiar memories. The general direction of the paths had not changed over thirty thousand years. A couple of times he’d caught the Princess’s eyes, and they had been shiny with unshed tears. She felt the same as he. And then, shortly after they left the cave—

  “This is the Stone from which King Arthur pulled the sword,” said Sally. “You wouldn’t know about that because it was a human thing, the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Arthur found the Stone by accident and pulled out the Sword, but they wouldn’t believe him. So masses of nobles gathered, and knights and ladies, and he did it again, and they knelt before him and called him King of all England. And the sun came out at that moment and shone on the Sword and all the diamonds in it, and on Arthur’s hair. His hair was red, by the way.”

  “What happened next?” asked Fang.

  “Everything was wonderful, and everybody stopped fighting because Arthur was such a good king. And he married Guinevere, the most beautiful woman in the world. Sir Lancelot fell in love with her, and she loved him, too, but she didn’t say anything because she was a good queen. Some people said they were caught in bed together, but I don’t believe that for one moment.”

  “I’m sure it never happened,” said the Miggot. “What about Mordred?”

  “I don’t remember a Mordred.”

  “And Nyneve?” asked Fang.

  “She was jealous of Guinevere. She was a nasty piece of work. How do you know about Nyneve?”

  “Oh … I must have heard the story myself, when I was here last. Do they tell the story often?”

  Marc laughed. “All the time. And it seems to grow with the telling. My father says it’s just our reaction to the saviors. He says they protect us so much that our imaginations rebel. The more blood and fighting in the Arthur stories, the better people like them. And there’s another good thing about them—they happened before the saviors came, or even the computers. So they’re human things, and the saviors can’t do anything about them.”

  There was a certain nostalgia about their arrival at the village of the Swingers too. It was located on the site of old Mara Zion. The giantish creatures gathered around, amazed, pointing and prodding.

  Marc’s father, Adam, was the village chief, and after the initial commotion he was able to get people to stand back. He took Fang and his companions to the schoolroom and set them on a desk.

  “Don’t make so much noise,” he told the Swingers, who were yelling with excitement. “My son tells me our guests have an unusual relationship with the saviors. We don’t want to attract attention until we hear what these little fellows have to say.”

  People took their seats, “Are they gnomes?” somebody called, unable to contain his impatience. “Real gnomes, like in the Arthur stories?”

  “We three are,” Fang piped back, pleased that their fame spanned thirty millennia.

  “What about the monkey? Is he your pet?”

  “I am not!” Afah squeaked, outraged. “The gnomes were created by my people.”

  There was a murmur of excitement. They were obviously amazed that Afah could talk. Adam said to his son, “Tell us all about it, Marc.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know.” Nervously, unaccustomed to being in a position of such eminence, Marc addressed the Swingers. Sally stood beside him, nudging him from time to time when she felt he hadn’t gotten it quite right but managing to refrain from interrupting. She, too, was overawed by the size of their audience. Her own people were not so gregarious, and the Wingers’ village was a scattering of ramshackle tree houses.

  Marc described the savior’s tumble, which he attributed to carelessness; the arrival of the kikihuahuas and their identification of the Tin Mother; and the Tin Mother’s equally astonishing revelation of the origins of the Swingers and the Wingers. At this point the audience began to mutter.

  “You mean they’re waiting for us to die off? We’re just a nuisance to them?”

  “The savior says we’re not well suited to Earth.”

  “And perhaps it was right,” said Adam. “After all, the Swinger population is down to a few dozen hereabouts, and the Wingers are fewer than that.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We rebel!” Sally yelled back unexpectedly. “We fight our way through to the True Humans and we stir them up, and we dismantle every last savior, and we fire up the star-ships and take off for our real homes!”

  The simplicity appealed to the wilder element in the audience, and there was a spontaneous burst of applause.

  “There’s more than one group of True Humans in the world, and the saviors are everywhere,” Adam pointed out.

  “So we start here. And listen,” continued Sally, “we should stop calling those bastards saviors, because that’s just what they’re not. The kikihuahua has a good name for them—he calls them the Tin Mothers. That’s what his people named them when they realized what a load of trouble they’d built for themselves. So what we’re going to do, is wipe out those Mothers!”

  This time the applause was even more sustained.

  When he could make himself heard, Adam said, “You’re right, Tin Mothers they are. But we need something to shake up the True Humans. Something to make it worth their while shutting off their dreams and facing the real world.”

  “Tell them aliens have landed,” somebody suggested.

  “Switch off their life-support systems!” This from Sally.

  The meeting became a general discussion after that, with the schemes for enlisting the support of the True Humans becoming progressively wilder. Drink began to flow, and an impromptu party developed, during which the objective of the gathering was somehow forgotten. Toasts were drunk to the gnomes and to Marc and Sally, without the proposers quite remembering why these central figures had become, in some way, heroes. By dawn the forest clearing was littered with snoring bodies.

  “They’re no different from the giants we knew years ago,” observed Fang in disgust. He and his companions had remained sober and dozed whenever possible. They felt the need to keep their wits about them. Now, as the new sunlight began to tip the treetops with crimson, they were in reasonably good shape.

  “By the time they awaken, all impetus will have been lost,” observed Afah.

  “Perhaps not,” said Adam, who had remained protectively near the little people all night. “Nobody likes to be told their only purpose in life is to become extinct. This is the start of something new, and tomorrow the news will be carried all over the forest.”

  Fang’s eyelids felt sandy, and the great scheme for saving the human race was losing its appeal. “I’m going for a walk. I’d like to take a look at things again, in daylight.” He’d been surrounded by huge and powerful creatures for too long. He needed to get away from the danger of being trodden on, and into the world he knew and loved. He needed to revisit a few old haunts.

  “I’ll come with you, Fang,” said the Princess.

  “Cheer up, Fang,” said the Princess.

  They walked hand in hand down leaf-carpeted paths. The scenery was familiar enough, yet unsettling, as the path kept taking unexpected twists. Fang found himself thinking about old times, remembering old faces now sleeping a million kilometers away. He remembered ancient events that seemed to have happened so recently that it was a shock to realize that even the trees had passed through countless generations since then.

  �
�We’ve done the right thing, haven’t we, Princess?” he asked.

  “Of course we have. We don’t want to rot away in the bat.”

  “I didn’t think we wanted to,” said Fang doubtfully. “But now I’m beginning to wonder. Everything’s different.”

  “You and I are the same.”

  He tried to smile. “You’ll never change. But me? I don’t feel like the same gnome. I feel as though all the stuffing’s been knocked out of me.” He gestured at the forest. “What do we do now? Where do we start? And how did we get caught up in this rebellion against the Tin Mothers?”

  “It’s our duty, Fang. Afah said so.”

  He straightened up. “It’s not just a matter of duty. We don’t have any choice.” The moment of uncertainty over, he brightened and strode forward.

  “Away, Thunderer,” said the Princess mischievously.

  “They still think I’m a hero because of the Slaying of the Daggertooth—which never happened, really. Not the way people think it did. What do you think, Princess?”

  “I think you’re a very brave gnome who rid the forest of a horrible creature.”

  “The daggertooth chased me home, and I slammed the door so hard that a rock fell from the cave roof onto its head. Certainly I shouted, ‘Away, Thunderer!’ But that was to make the bloody rabbit hop around a bit, and divert the daggertooth’s attention from me. I’m no hero, Princess. There’s no such thing as a hero, really. A hero is just an ordinary gnome on a happentrack that doesn’t have any branches. Other people can make what they like of it, but he knows he has no choice.”

  “You did some thinking in the bat?”

  “There wasn’t much else to do. Aren’t you disgusted, now that you know the truth about the daggertooth? You know, I cringe whenever they shout, ‘Away, Thunderer!’ It embarrasses me to say the words.”

  “It’s a stirring cry and it does the gnomes a lot of good. They’re going to need a lot of good memories to build on. We’ve got a big job in front of us, Fang.”

  “Last night, did you notice? Misty Moon is coming back.”

  They arrived at a broad clearing where rock lay close to the surface and showed through in places. Fang sat, drawing the Princess down beside him. The morning sun slanted through the trees, sparkling on the dew-tipped grass. Fang fell silent, staring around.