Guardian

by Joe Haldeman

  “I could go back now,” I said to Raven, “and be out of danger. God bless you for bringing me here.”

  “You might want to withhold your thanks for a while.” The golden room appeared behind him.

  “That’s right, other places to go.” I tried to thank them with my most fervent prayer—praying through my feet!—then followed Raven into the room.

  The cinnamon smell was gone, replaced by a soft musk, like the smell of a kitten. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the wrenching disorientation.

  It wasn’t as bad the second time. I knew what to expect, and knew it wouldn’t last forever.

  “Open your eyes.” Room, raven, door. Outside the door, a steamy fetid jungle. “I’ll go out first. They don’t much like mammals here, except as food.”

  He hopped out into the jungle about twenty feet, looking left and right, and then began to change.

  He grew to the size of an eagle, and then larger, impossibly large for a bird—and as he grew even larger, his shape changed, the wings becoming arms with taloned claws, his head a monstrous dragon’s head. He yawned, showing rows of white fangs longer than fingers, and roared, as loud and deep as an ocean liner’s foghorn. Steam issued from his horrible mouth; I expected flame.

  The raven beckoned with impressive claws and I stepped out, a little apprehensive, feeling like food. But as soon as I was out of the room I started to transform, myself. My viewpoint rose higher off the ground and my vision began to change, as it had done when I was an eagle, eyes on opposite sides of my head.

  I could feel my body bulking and changing. I leaned back naturally and balanced on a long thick tail. Tilting my head to inspect myself, I saw that I was a smaller version of the raven, with the same pebbly skin, but where he was glossy black, I was a kind of paisley of green and brown.

  Ten or twelve feet tall, I probably weighed as much as a small elephant. And I had an elephant-sized hunger. Through the jungle smell of mold and earth, marigold and jasmine, came a clear note of rotting flesh, as mouth-watering to this body and brain as a pot roast to my other.

  The raven made a series of grunts and clicks that I understood: “This way.” He started crashing through the undergrowth and I followed him, rocking unsteadily from side to side at first, and then gaining confidence in the powerful legs.

  We came to a clearing where a large creature, twice the size of the creature he had become, lay dead and quickly decomposing in the heat. About half had been eaten, perhaps by whoever killed it. Smaller lizards and things that seemed both lizard and bird were feasting on the carcass.

  The raven roared at them, and I added my higher pitched scream. They backed and flapped away, not in total retreat, but just to wait while we had our fill.

  “Hurry,” the raven grunted and clicked. “Be ready to move fast.”

  I hesitated, not because the maggoty carcass looked unpalatable—it looked as good as a beef Wellington—but because I wasn’t sure how to go about it. My arms were too short for the hands to reach my mouth.

  The raven tilted down, his tail extended for balance, and tore at the flesh with his jaws. I did the same, and with an odd memory of bobbing for apples, quite enjoyed gulping down bushels of wormy flesh, crunching through bones to get to the putrid softness inside.

  After about a minute of heavenly feasting, there was a piercing screech and Raven butted me hard to distract me from the banquet. Two creatures even twice his size were stalking toward us, teeth bared, unmistakably challenging us to defend our lunch.

  Raven bounded away, and I followed him. We scrambled back down the path he’d torn a few minutes before, and when we came to the end of it, crashed determinedly through the solid jungle. I looked back, and the giants weren’t pursuing.

  He wasn’t just running away, though; he had a definite direction. The jungle thinned and we splashed across a wide shallow river, out onto an endless savannah.

  On the horizon was a single black mountain. He tilted his head at it and grunted one syllable: “There.”

  We loped easily through the grass. I was aware that we had no real enemies here; I probably could have killed a lesser creature, like a human, with my breath alone. But we saw no other living things, which was no surprise. Our progress was as subtle as a locomotive’s.

  The grass thinned as we approached the mountain’s slope. When it became a rocky incline, Raven stopped abruptly and turned back into a bird. I felt an odd churning inside, and became a woman again. My limbs ached pleasantly from the exercise, but I urgently needed both toothbrush and toilet.

  “Here.” Raven hopped over to some tufts of grass. “Chew this.” I did, and it had a pleasant mild garlic flavor. Then I retreated behind a rocky outcrop, feeling a little silly for my modesty, and took my ease, then used smooth pebbles to clean up, Arab style.

  I rearranged the strange clothing and returned to Raven. “Thank you. That was a fascinating experience.”

  “A diversion,” he said, “and a quick lunch. This mountain is what we came for. You just shat upon a living creature.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry; we birds do it all the time. And it didn’t notice.” He turned to look up the slope. “It doesn’t know I exist, though I’ve shared its mind twice. Its essence.”

  “What is it called?”

  “It doesn’t have language, with no one else to talk to. I call it the Dark Man.”

  “Could I share its … essence, too?”

  “That’s why I brought you here. But I warn you it’s disturbing.”

  “More so than being threatened by hungry dinosaurs?”

  “Oh, quite. Being a dinosaur yourself, you knew they’d leave you be once you surrendered the food.”

  He was right; I hadn’t been scared, just annoyed. “What is there to fear here?”

  “It’s not fear. Just knowledge of a special kind. Do you remember the time you first truly knew you were going to die?”

  I thought. “Actually, no. I’m not sure.”

  “It was when you saw the Brady photographs of the ruins of Atlanta. You were ten.”

  The memory opened an emptiness. “All right. So this will be like that?”

  “Perhaps worse. But I think you have to see it.”

  “Right here?”

  “No. We have to fly to the top.” He turned me into the eagle again. “Don’t think about what you’re doing. Just look at where you want to go.”

  It was more complicated than that, but then suddenly simple, once I let instinct take over. I flapped awkwardly a number of times, but when I was a couple of yards off the ground, realized I should tilt into the warm wind that rose up the side of the mountain of the Dark Man. Then I could spiral up almost without effort.

  A shadow passed over me and I looked up to see a flying lizard about my own size. Instead of a beak, it had a mouth like a barracuda’s, fangs overlapping up and down. It opened the mouth and screeched, and after a moment of terror I realized it wasn’t after me; it was threatening, warning me off the smaller prey. It dropped, talons out.

  “Raven!” I cried.

  Just before it reached him. Raven turned into a monstrous machine of articulated shiny metal, twice the lizard’s size. The thing struck him with a clang; he slapped it off with a razor wing and it sped away in bleeding confusion.

  Raven kept his metallic form until we reached the top. We both sculled onto a flat space and he turned back into a raven, and I into a woman.

  “This way,” he said, hopping toward a dark cave. I was annoyed that he didn’t thank me for warning him about the danger. For a girl from Philadelphia, I made a pretty competent eagle.

  At the entrance to the cave, he stopped, and turned into old Gordon. He said a few words in Tlingit.

  “Ask its permission to enter.”

  “I thought you said the Dark Man wasn’t aware of us.”

  “He isn’t, himself, but his body has defenses. It took me awhile to figure this out: it won’t admit any creature that doesn’
t have a language.”

  “Any language?”

  “Just ask it permission.”

  The lines in bad Latin and French came to mind. “May I please come in, Dark Man?”

  I guess I expected a magic door to creak open or something. But nothing changed, except for a slight cool breeze from the darkness. He changed back into a raven and hopped into the mouth of the cave, and I followed.

  We picked our way through a jumbled pile of bones.

  “You said it doesn’t have a language. Yet it only admits people and things who do?”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” As if on cue, the huge toothy flying reptile skidded to a halt a few feet away, outside the cave mouth. Raven shrieked a warning at it, a painfully loud scream that reverberated in the small space. But the lizard had seen us change back into something resembling food, and of course didn’t stop to consider the oddness of that. It hopped into the cave, baring teeth, and approached the pile of bones, leathery wings dragging behind, leaving a smear of blood.

  It couldn’t see us. “Maybe you better change back,” I whispered.

  Hearing me, it tilted its head to peer into the darkness. It picked up a long bone in a taloned foot and delicately gnawed on one end. Then it dropped it and raised its wings in a kind of protective tent over its head and made a sound between a growl and a crow’s caw, and stalked toward us over the bones, all teeth and terrible purpose. It got about halfway—I looked to Raven, who was watching with calm curiosity—and it suddenly stopped, cried out, and pitched forward, obviously dead.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Want to do an autopsy?”

  “But … how did you know? This is his planet, and he just walked in and died.”

  “It’s his planet, but there’s only one Dark Man on it. Creatures who find their way into the cave just die; they don’t have any way to warn the next creature. Unless they have language, in which case there’s no danger.”

  “But how did you find that out?”

  “I’m always asking around. Someone on another planet told me about the Dark Man and I came here. It’s an interesting experience.”

  “Disturbing, you said.”

  “That, too. Can you see me well enough to follow?”

  He was black against gray. “Go ahead.”

  It was less scary than a cave on Earth. Cool and damp, but nothing like spiders or bats—unless they could talk, I supposed. As we moved farther in, slightly uphill, it was obvious that the walls were dimly phosphorescent. We went around a curve and there was no more light from the entrance behind us, but I could still see Raven, and rocks along the path.

  We went around another bend and there was a faint flickering light. Then a steep incline, perhaps fifty yards, and we entered the large chamber from which the light was coming.

  It was a window to the sky. But it wasn’t obviously sky—it was a bluish-gray vista, on which concentric circular lines of light were superimposed, flickering.

  “The circles are stars,” Raven said. “Months are going by every second. This window faces what would be north, in Alaska, so we see the circumpolar stars rotating around the pole. But they’re going so fast they look like streaks.” He hopped up a pile of rocks that formed a natural staircase, and I followed with ease.

  Below us spread the broad savannah and the thick jungle, separated by the river. The jungle seemed to vibrate, as trees died and were replaced. The river itself undulated, coiling like a slow serpent.

  “It must take centuries for a river to change its course like that,” I said. Raven nodded like a human, staring.

  Over the space of a few seconds, the savannah was transformed into pastureland. Huts of wood and stone—pieces of the Dark Man?—appeared and disappeared.

  Parts of the jungle were cleared and a bridge snapped into place over the river. A town appeared and became a city, with regular streets and tall buildings on both sides of the river. Two more bridges appeared. The city spread out to the horizon, and it seemed almost to be dancing, as new buildings replaced old ones in ripples of progress.

  A throbbing curve of fire on the horizon. “That’s a spaceport,” Raven said, “where they leave for other stars. They won’t get to Earth; it’s too far away. And they don’t have much time.”

  As he said that, there was a lurch, and the city was suddenly leveled, a static jumble of ruins. The river started to move again, and widened into a lake.

  In less than a minute, the jungle reclaimed the ruins on the other side of the water.

  “Look at the stars,” the raven said.

  “I don’t see anything different.”

  “Keep looking. Use that hill on the horizon as a reference.”

  I looked at the hill for a minute and saw that the circles of stars were slowly crawling to my right.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Dark Man is turning around to face the sun. The land nearby is moving with him.”

  “Is that what happened to the city—was it an earthquake when the Dark Man started to move?”

  “No. They did that to themselves. Happens.”

  “People appeared and disappeared just like that?”

  “It was actually quite a long time, to them. And they weren’t people as such—as I said, mammals are just food here. They were lizards similar to the ones in the jungle—much like you were, but with longer arms and useful hands.”

  I remembered how it felt. “Just as vicious, though.”

  “Something they had in common with humans.”

  I looked out over the expanse, now apparently an inland sea. There was no sign of their civilization.

  “The Dark Man has seen this happen before, and it may happen again. He’s turning around to watch the sun because it changes on a time scale that’s meaningful to him. He’ll watch it die, over billions of years.”

  “Does this always happen?”

  “Stars dying? Of course.”

  “No—I mean the lizards. Does civilization always bring ruin?”

  “Not always. Often.”

  He hopped down the steps to lead me back down the corridor. “It’s all timing. Once a species learns how to exchange ideas, a process is set in motion that might ultimately result in permanent peace and harmony. But it’s not inevitable.”

  “As in our case. Humans.”

  “Timing, as I say. In one way of looking at it, humans discovered fire a little too early; fire and metals. From there on, it’s only a matter of time before a species learns to use the forces that make stars burn. If they haven’t grown past the need to wage war by then, their prospects aren’t good.”

  I stepped carefully down the wet rocks, thinking of how I had saved my son from a senseless war, only to have him killed by a senseless man. “So you say that humanity is going to go the way of these lizards.”

  “You’re asking me to predict the future, which is meaningless. There are many futures.” He started down the corridor. “Come on. More places to see.”

  On the last step, I twisted my ankle and fell. He hopped back when he heard me cry out, changing into old Gordon, who gave me a hand.

  We hobbled along. “It’s only a couple of hundred yards to my ship. The room.”

  “It seems to go anywhere you want,” I said through clenched teeth. “Why not just whistle for it?”

  “It can’t come in here. Time is funny in here, as you may have noticed.”

  We came out of the cave into a pelting rain. He carried me the few steps to the yellow light. Once inside, my ankle immediately stopped hurting. The place, or thing, smelled like cinnamon again.

  “You should open up a clinic,” I said. He’d changed back into a raven. “You’d be the richest bird on Earth.”

  “I already am, when I’m on Earth.”

  “You travel like this, most of the time?”

  “Time, space.” He flexed his wings in an unmistakable shrug. “I do keep moving, observing. But in a way, I’m always in Sitka. Gordon doesn’t d
isappear for months at a time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Soon.” We both dissolved into the now-familiar transition state.

  A moment later, we were back in the yellow room. “Did something go wrong?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re never far from this place.”

  The door opened and I stepped toward it. “Don’t go outside. Just look. I think if we went outside we couldn’t get back in.”

  “Where are we?” It looked like a quiet woodland.

  “There isn’t any ‘where’ or ‘when’ here. Everybody sees something different. Tell me what you think it is.”

  I stepped cautiously to the door. There was a disturbing noise.

  It was a quiet woodland otherwise. Birds twittering. The smell of green growing things. Buds flowering.

  A pear tree with a single large fruit. A snake the size of a python draped among its limbs.

  “The Garden of Eden?” I said. “This can’t be real.”

  “Whatever it is or is not, it’s real. Do you see the pain yet?”

  The room moved over a thick stand of bushes, toward the noise. “Stay inside,” Raven repeated.

  In a small clearing, a pregnant woman lay on her back. She was covered with streaks of blood, hair matted with it. She was grunting and whimpering hoarsely with exhaustion and pain. God, had I ever been there. I took an instinctive step forward.

  Gordon suddenly appeared, blocking the door. “Stay. I mean it. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “All right,” I said. He turned around and looked out the door.

  The woman—I couldn’t think of her as “Eve”—was very close to giving birth. Her womb was dilating and I could see the top of the head, hair black as her own.

  Blood oozed around the presenting head. Her body writhed and she screamed, keening.

  “Steady,” Gordon said, a hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I said. “I’ve done it.”

  “Not like this, I think.”

  Her womb opened impossibly wide and for a moment the screaming stopped—then in a spray of blood the head came out It was an adult’s head.

  Her own head? Now it started screaming; even louder. With a start, I saw that the mother’s head and neck had disappeared.