World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  “No!” Beauty thundered, standing, suddenly, to his full height. There was anger in his eye, mixed with fear and grief. He looked like a child who’d just been told he was adopted. “It is not possible,,” he whispered harshly. “I have heard stories of the migration of Centaurs—stories of Before the Ice, how there were five great continents; how this was the Human continent, which they destroyed with neglect; how Centaurs fled here when their own land was destroyed by Vampires in the Hundred Days’ War, how …”

  Jasmine stopped him with a raised hand. “No, Beauty. Those are myths of your origin. Every species creates legends of its own beginnings, and those tales of continents and migrations are your myths. This history of mine: this is truth.”

  He looked at her in despair, his gaze a plea. She pressed the point. “Many of the creatures now in existence are results of these early experiments in genetic mapping and recombination. Cats with partly Human brains, like Isis, for instance. Such crosses were popular among the rich—as pets, curiosities, status symbols. It was the natural extension of the ultimate decadence—making fantasies real as reality decayed into mire.

  “After a short time, it wasn’t even all that expensive to commission mythological creatures—Sphinxes and Centaurs and whatnot. The middle class began acquiring them. Even zoos began buying examples. Then, of course, it became chic among the rich to outdo themselves, to get kinky. Vampires, naturally, were favorites—Human bodies, vampire-bat metabolism, specially engineered regulatory genes to control wing size. And of course, Humans raised them, trained them, nurtured them. So they became, truly, an expression of our dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and wishes. New, never-before-thought-of combinations, were conceived, their genes rewritten. Governments, naturally, grew their own secret stable, bred for their own secret purposes. Dabbling with life, myth, and death. It was the national sport.

  “Of course, there were accidents.” She paused at the mention, to let Josh and Beauty conjure up all the grotesque possibilities. But they knew only too well the results of these tamperings, the errors that still populated the forest. The small cave somehow became darker, and more chill. Unconsciously the three drew closer together. Jasmine spoke softer now.

  “Not only in the early experiments, but even later, in small underground labs. Horrible miscreants. Mistakes. Fortunately, many of these were sterile; but not all. And not all were destroyed at birth, either, as they should have been. They are still relatively few in number; but they are despised by everyone, including themselves.” She turned to Joshua. “And you wonder why they hate Humans so much.”

  Beauty still looked stunned. To cover, somewhat, the bareness of his emotion, Jasmine continued in a subdued patter. “Most descendants of engineered creatures, naturally, have strong ambivalences about Humans—love and hate for their creators; submission and rebellion—even it they no longer understand the origin of these feelings. It’s normal to feel these things, Beauty. But to understand these emotions, to know them openly, is to control them, to stop them from controlling you.”

  “It makes us no different, you and I,” said Josh to his old friend. He tried to hold the Centaur close with the strength of his loving gaze.

  “The Centauri is an ancient and noble race,” Beauty insisted quietly to the wall.

  “Noble, without question,” Jasmine pursued. “And nobler still, to be so in its infancy. Centaurs have evolved a great racial visage for themselves in two short centuries. The Human race, in five thousand times as long, has all but extinguished itself. And as far as that goes, neither race can lay much claim to age, I think, with ants and termites still building kingdoms beneath the earth.”

  “I dislike this talk of race,” snapped Josh. “Every animal is its own animal. Beauty, can you think differently of me now, after all we’ve shared?” he demanded.

  Beauty looked to Josh, then dropped his head. “You are no different, old friend. 7 am different. So we are different.”

  “You’re no different to me, old Horse. Unless you start acting different.”

  “I act as it pleases me to act,” the Centaur said with a haughtiness Josh had never seen. “Besides, this Neuroman’s story is obviously a child’s tale.”

  “It’s not, Beauty,” Jasmine spoke quietly. “You know I speak truth. Think. I’m the only one you’ve ever heard speak who was actually there.”

  “But this is nonsense,” he railed. “Tricks with words, again. More fool Scriberies …”

  “Hold your tongue, Beauty,” Josh cautioned. “There’s no need to—”

  But Beauty was losing his balance. “No need to nothing! You probably put her up to this—you try to convince me with words again.”

  “I try to convince you of nothing,” Jasmine said evenly. “I tell you merely what is. I know you can feel the truth of what I say.”

  “How easy for you with heart of steel and wire to speak of feeling,” the Centaur spoke bitterly.

  Now it was Joshua’s turn for anger. “Why you sullen, self-pitying gelding, your mother must have been a jackass.” Beauty’s mane stood on end. Josh continued. “Here you’ve just found out you’re of a brave new species, you could be inheriting the earth, and here you are—”

  “Do not think you can humiliate me, Human, just because you—”

  “Human!” Joshua’s voice rose. “So that’s where your noble race stands. You humiliate yourself with your infantile racism. You can’t even—”

  “I can’t even—”

  “Stop!” shouted Jasmine, and the confrontation halted instantly. There followed a bleak, shamed silence. Jasmine let the empty soundlessness press them a bit closer together again, press them back into shape; then spoke, barely audibly. “I think you’ve just found out what the Race War was all about. Really all about.” She searched their faces with her own, but they hid behind mirrored eyes. She put one hand on Joshua’s head, one on Beauty’s back. “Strong feelings divide us. But the same feelings bind us. Please, both of you. We’re a family.”

  Beauty turned away, faced the west wall. Josh lay back, staring at the ceiling. Jasmine sighed. “I didn’t mean for my story to break us,” she said. “It’s a common ancestor we share, a Human ancestor. We’re simply evolving differently. My evolution is leading to a dead end, nowhere else. Who knows where yours will lead? I thought you were strong enough for this, both of you, I thought … well, what’s the difference what I thought. You two get some sleep, you need it. I’ll take the first watch, my eyes are better than yours at night anyway.” She turned away.

  Jasmine knew Beauty believed her—there was no other reason for him to have become so upset, to have been thrown into such disequilibrium. She was not sorry, though. Shocks such as these were the only good test of character and mettle—and she wanted to be certain she was in the company of strong souls before she went any further with them into whatever dark regions this quest led.

  She heard Josh and Beauty talking quietly to each other, now, in a recessed corner of the cave—sounds of apology and regret mingled with pride.

  “Forgive me,” she heard the Centaur mumble, “I did not mean—”

  “No, no, it shook me up, too,” Josh was whispering. “She was—” “—it has to—” “—by tomorrow if we—” “I must consider the implications of—” Something about the energy between these two—their strength of purpose, their confused idealism—made Jasmine glad she’d come along. They gave her something she’d been missing for many years: a reason. Quietly, she left them to their own.

  She walked to the mouth of the cave, sat on her haunches, peered through the foliate cover into the daring night. Fog was beginning to roll in over the short hills like stray thoughts; wispy at first, quickly disappearing. By the time it was thick enough to fill the stony basins and creep over the heather knolls, the moon slipped under the horizon, and the darkness was complete. A chill pervaded the air that would have clung fast to any Human skin, but Neuromans were immune to such vagaries of weather. Jasmine registered the temperatur
e fall, but felt no discomfort. It was an hour before she even thought to look back at her friends, to gauge their distress; Josh and Beauty lay peacefully in the corner, curled together to share warmth; asleep.

  An hour before first light, in the whisper of the false dawn, a tumble of rocks crashed down around the cave entrance. The three sprang alert: Josh drew knife, Beauty arrow, Jasmine sword, as they stood in readiness facing the ragged portal. They waited.

  Thirty seconds. Beauty felt snared, but yet withal content at the opportunity, finally, to fight. Josh hoped only that he would not die before he avenged his love. Jasmine steadied her reflexes, studied her fear.

  One minute. There was a scratching at the outermost stones; some of the camouflaging leaves fell apart. Beauty bent his bow as two palm fronds fell into the cave. A long moment; a crash; and in ran a small raccoon, the black rings around its eyes making it look like nothing so much as a cartoon ghost. It stopped, looked the three hunters over, turned and walked out again.

  The tension broke somewhat, but nobody relaxed. Jasmine stepped gingerly forward and peered through the greenery. “No one else out there,” she muttered. The others remained silent. Jasmine motioned them to be still, then slipped outside into the misty dim morning.

  CHAPTER 8: In Which The Company Falls Prey

  FOR five minutes, not a sound; not a whisper. Jasmine finally re-entered the cave with saber sheathed, looking perplexed. “Gone,” she said. “All gone.”

  “The JEGS?” asked Beauty.

  “JEGS, Vampires, Accidents, Humans. All left town.”

  They went up to have a look around; even Josh, who walked as if on thin ice over black water. The lookout perch above ground was vacant, now, a patchwork of prints that led finally down the bluff. Inexorably, south.

  And far below, the Vampire camp was evacuated. A couple of empty wagons could be seen, left behind like old shoes.

  “They won’t be waiting for us,” said Josh. “Let’s get moving.”

  “You’re still in no shape …” began Jasmine.

  “My water’s almost clear this morning. And my back hurts much less,” he replied. “In any case, I’m going.” He looked resolute.

  Beauty was somewhat in conflict, though he was clearly anxious to be off in pursuit. He looked at Jasmine tentatively. “Perhaps if he rode me …” he questioned.

  Jasmine didn’t think she could restrain them any further, so she shrugged affirmatively.

  Beauty held out his arm, Josh pulled himself up on the Centaur’s back; and without further ado, they set off at a walk.

  The prints merged, presently: Vampires, Accidents, Humans in loose formation; JEGS in pursuit. Josh was relieved to be behind Jarl’s tenacious soldiers for once.

  The hunters walked in silence for some hours, an easy quiet, concentrating on the trail. They felt much closer to each other following the previous night’s recriminations. Private demons aired, they could focus with clarity, now, on the thing they shared, the thing that unified them—the pursuit of the enemy.

  Since Josh was riding, he took the opportunity to set the record in wobbly script, marking the past day’s events down on paper. For ink, he used spit and the natural dye from crushed blueflower petals. For support, he used Beauty’s back. “The Word is great, the Word is One,” he whispered quietly when he was finished, replacing the folded paper neatly back in its tube.

  The sun never came out of the clouds all morning, keeping the air cool and expectant. Violent weather was foreshadowed. Beside a shallow, racing brook, a dead weasel lay on the cold dirt, its eyes still open, seeming to watch. Very likely an omen.

  Joshua grew meditative to the gentle rhythm of the Centaur’s pace. His thoughts wandered everywhere. He mused on Jasmine’s funny speech patterns—the strange accumulation of verbal mannerisms she’d acquired over three centuries of discourse. He wondered about Isis’ beginnings, what she thought about, what she’d encountered in the Vampire encampment. He wished Beauty silent strength in weathering Jasmine’s revelations. He tried to visualize what Dicey was doing at that very moment. He saw the clouds change from animals to trees to mysteriously unknowable shapes. He smelled the wind. He lost himself in trivial sensations; spilled random thoughts into space.

  Toward noon, the barometer fell discernibly. The clouds took on a bleak and fitful mood. In the south, now, the ragged peaks of the Saddleback Mountains rose darkly out of the horizon, like the unmoving spine of an unsleeping reptile. The wind changed direction, yet again. All nature seemed intent: there was little inconsequential movement.

  As the tracks of the quarry veered somewhat east, the hidden sun passed its cryptic meridian. Each hunter marked the moment with an internal clock, a hunter’s sense. Over plain and moor, they followed the winding trail with singular absorption; in thought, though, each followed an independent track.

  Jasmine mused repeatedly on the existence of the new animal in the south to which Lon had referred. What manner of creature could it be? To her knowledge, no new animals had been created, discovered, or evolved in almost two hundred years. At least since the total collapse of the old technocracy, Before the Ice. So what was the nature of the beast? A thinking animal, clearly. Certainly malevolent. But what? Invented Before the Ice, perhaps, and dormant until now; programmed, perhaps, to awaken a century later, after the Ice Change. Or maybe just a recent mutation. Or maybe there wasn’t a new animal at all—maybe this was just an obfuscating rumor, a smoke screen to disguise simple Vampire expansionism, Accident terrorism, carnal anarchy, slave trade. Or was it something entirely other?

  Joshua thought about Venge-right. Under the old laws, personal vengeance sought against those who’d perpetrated violent, personal, unprovoked crimes was allowed, even expected. Josh felt entitled, legally and morally, to his revenge. Even though there were, of course, no laws anymore. None, at least, that everyone adhered to, or considered just. Joshua had read law books, and was uncertain at this point whether Venge-right had meaning any longer; or whether it now had the same force and ethic behind it as the act of the creatures who’d murdered and abducted his family: the force of will. He thought this; and then he thought that perhaps Beauty was right after all. It was bad to read too much.

  Certainly most other animals felt this way—reading was evil, tainted. It set Scribes apart. It excluded them from the animal communtiy at large, and consequently bound the Scribes together all the more closely. It gave Scribes the feeling that they were somehow better and worse than all other creatures. And this made them aloof. Since his earliest days, Josh had registered this sense of being an outsider—that somehow he was simultaneously feared, envied, and despised for his birthright. It made him wonder now—as he so often had before—about the origin of Scribery. Early religious tracts dated it to six thousand years Before the Ice—when the Word was made manifest to the first Human. All other words had been made from that first Word, from permutations and combinations of the original letters. Then in the First Age of Darkness, the first Word had become lost, and it had been the quest of all scholars since that time to find it again. There were allusions to it in subsequent, derivative texts, references to the original documents—footnotes to the Word. But most books had been destroyed in the holocaust Before the Ice—so the Word was not likely ever to be found; nor the true beginnings of the religion. It was something he would ask Jasmine about. She might be able to shed some light.

  The day inched along; they continued walking. Beauty noted a natural dip in the landscape that marked the end of the territories overseen by Jarl—the beginning of the Doge’s domain. Of course no one could lay true claim to any lands since the Race War, but different powers had different areas of strength and influence, and the JEGS’ authority waned in the southern provinces.

  Beauty liked Jarl, certainly better than he liked the Doge; and so was somewhat uneasy now. He’d fought with Jarl’s infantry in the War, fought proudly. Jarl believed in animal virtues, not Human aesthetics. Jarl had no morals, but he knew w
hat was right. And war or no war, he fought for his knowledge.

  As did Beauty. The Centaur realized something finally: it was proper to fight for what was correct in the moment; this was an animal virtue. Not to dwell on what once was right, or even on what once was. Those were Human foibles, Scriptic illusions. So it truly made no difference what the origin of his race was. Nothing mattered, in fact, before his immediate memory. This thought cheered him. Ancestry was a Human conceit—Beauty could find his strength in the animal ways.

  He cocked his head in the wind. It would rain soon. Bad for tracking. Beauty stifled the urge to pick up his pace, lest he injure Joshua. He felt his friend’s hands holding loosely to his mane, and kept a steady walk.

  The Old one in the sky cleared his throat, and the three comrades tilted their heads at the rumble of thunder.

  In spite of the menace of the gathering sky, Josh felt himself getting sleepy.

  In less than an hour, they were inside the Forest of Tears. Planted years before as a tribute to some person or idea now unknown, the forest had flourished, spread. Weeping willows, mostly, now so thick it was impossible to do anything but weave through them. So thick the sky was invisible. So thick nothing else grew besides the occasional onion, the silent moss, the quivering fern.

  Josh slipped down off Beauty’s back soon after they entered. His bruised flank still hurt, but no more did he have the deep, visceral pain that had choked his movement the day before. He was a fast mender, a trait that had saved him not a few times in the past.

  The light in the wood was eerie, foreboding: dark, violet prestorm rays filtered through the heavy leaf-green cover into the cool, earth-colored air: dream-light. Josh took out his knife and carved a short message into a fat willow trunk, marking the date, the person, the intention.

  Beauty shook his head. “Scribbles,” he muttered, not even bothering to make the sarcastic hand gesture he frequently did just to annoy Joshua. “You might want to leave them a map of where we are going as well,” he added pointedly.