“Yes. We must. Once they were good and useful, but we let them grow upon us like a cancer, and now nothing but destruction and a new beginning can save us.
“Have you considered the chaos?”
“Yes. It too is necessary. We will not be men without the freedom to know suffering. In it is also enlightenment. Through it we travel beyond ourselves, beyond earth and stars, space and time, to Mystery.”
“So you maintain that there is some undefined ultimate vagueness behind the measurable universe?” She smiles into the bat eyes. We have each been taught, as children, to laugh on hearing sarcasms of this kind. “Please offer me a little proof.”
“No,” I say. “Prove to me instead, beyond any doubt, that there is not something we cannot understand with words and equations. Prove to me likewise that I have no right to seek for it.
“The burden of proof is on You Two, so often have You lied to us. In the name of rationality, You resurrected myth. The better to control us! In the name of liberation, You chained our inner lives and castrated our souls. In the name of service, You bound and blinkered us. In the name of achievement, You held us to a narrower round than any swine in its pen. In the name of beneficence, You created pain, and horror, and darkness beyond darkness.” I turn to the people. “I went there. I descended into the cellars. I know!”
“He found that SUM would not pander to his special wishes, at the expense of everyone else,” cries the Dark Queen. Do I hear shrillness in Her voice? “Therefore he claims SUM is cruel.”
“I saw my dead,” I tell them. “She will not rise again. Nor yours, nor you. Not ever. SUM will not, cannot raise us. In Its house is death indeed. We must seek life and rebirth elsewhere, among the mysteries.”
She laughs aloud and points to my soul bracelet, glimmering faintly in the gray-blue thickening twilight. Need She say anything?
“Will someone give me a knife and an ax?” I ask.
The crowd stirs and mumbles. I smell their fear. Streetlamps go on, as if they could scatter more than this corner of the night which is roiling upon us. I fold my arms and wait. The Dark Queen says something to me. I ignore Her.
The tools pass from hand to hand. He who brings them up the stairs conies like a flame. He kneels at my feet and lifts what I have desired. The tools are good ones, a broad-bladed hunting knife and a long double-bitted ax.
Before the world, I take the knife in my right hand and slash beneath the bracelet on my left wrist. The connections to my inner body are cut. Blood flows, impossibly brilliant under the lamps. It does not hurt; I am too exalted.
The Dark Queen shrieks. “You meant it! Harper, Harper!”
“There is no life in SUM,” I say. I pull my hand through the circle and cast the bracelet down so it rings.
A voice of brass: “Arrest that maniac for correction. He is deadly dangerous.”
The monitors who have stood on the fringes of the crowd try to push through. They are resisted. Those who seek to help them encounter fists and fingernails.
I take the ax and smash downward. The bracelet crumples. The organic material within, starved of my secretions, exposed to the night air, withers.
I raise the tools, ax in right hand, knife in bleeding heft. “I seek eternity where it is to be found,” I call. “Who goes with me?”
A score or better break loose from the riot, which is already calling forth weapons and claiming lives. They surround me with their bodies. Their eyes are the eyes of prophets. We make haste to seek a hiding place, for one military robot has appeared and others will not be long in coming. The tall engine strides to stand guard over Our Lady, and this is my last glimpse of Her.
My followers do not reproach me for having cost them all they were. They are mine. In me is the godhead which can do no wrong.
And the war is open, between me and SUM. My friends are few, my enemies many and mighty. I go about the world as a fugitive. But always I sing. And always I find someone who will listen, will join us, embracing pain and death like a lover.
With the Knife and the Ax I take their souls. Afterward we hold for them the ritual of rebirth. Some go thence to become outlaw missionaries; most put on facsimile bracelets and return home, to whisper my word. It makes little difference to me. I have no haste, who own eternity.
For my word is of what lies beyond time. My enemies say I call forth ancient bestialities and lunacies; that I would bring civilization down in ruin; that it matters not a madman’s giggle to me whether war, famine, amid pestilence will again scour the earth. With these accusations I am satisfied. The language of them shows me that here, too, I have reawakened anger. And that emotion belongs to us as much as any other. More than the others, maybe, in this autumn of mankind. We need a gale, to strike down SUM and everything It stands for. Afterward will come the winter of barbarism.
Amid after that the springtime of a new and (perhaps) more human civilization. My friends seem to believe this will come in their very lifetimes: peace, brotherhood, enlightenment, sanctity. I know otherwise. I have been in the depths. The wholeness of mankind, which I am bringing back, has its horrors.
When one day
the Eater of the Gods returns
the Wolf breaks his chain
the Horsemen ride forth
the Age ends
the Beast is reborn
then SUM will be destroyed; and you, strong and fair, may go back to earth and rain.
I shall await you.
My aloneness is nearly ended, Daybright. Just one task remains. The god must die, that his followers may believe he is raised from the dead and lives forever. Then they will go on to conquer the world.
There are those who say I have spurned and offended them. They too, borne on the tide which I raised, have torn out their machine souls and seek in music and ecstasy to find a meaning for existence. But their creed is a savage one, which has taken them into wildcountry, where they ambush the monitors sent against them and practice cruel rites. They believe that the final reality is female. Nevertheless, messengers of theirs have approached me with the suggestion of a mystic marriage. This I refused; my wedding was long ago, and will be celebrated again when this cycle of the world has closed.
Therefore they hate me. But I have said I will come and talk to them.
I leave the road at the bottom of the valley and walk singing up the hill. Those few I let come this far with me have been told to abide my return. They shiver in the sunset; the vernal equinox is three days away. I feel no cold myself. I stride exultant among briars and twisted ancient apple trees. If my bare feet leave a little blood in the snow, that is good. The ridges around are dark with forest, which waits like the skeleton dead for heaves to be breathed across it again. The eastern sky is purple, where stands the evening star. Overhead, against blue, cruises an early flight of homebound geese. Their calls drift faintly down to me. Westward, above me and before me, smolders redness. Etched black against it are the women.
The End
********************************
Hunter's Moon,
by Poul Anderson
Analog Nov. 1978
Novelette - 15239 words
A scientist cannot perform an experiment without influencing it. Is this good or bad?
We do not perceive reality, we conceive it. To suppose otherwise is to invite catastrophic surprises. The tragic nature of history stems in large part from this endlessly recurrent mistake.
—Oskar Haeml, Betrachtungen über die menschliche Verlegenheit
*** Both suns were now down. The western mountains had become a wave of blackness, unstirring, as though the cold of Beyond had touched and frozen it even as it crested, a first sea barrier on the flightway to the Promise; but heaven stood purple above, bearing the earliest stars and two small moons, ocher edged with silvery crescents, like the Promise itself. Eastward, the sky remained blue. There, just over the ocean, Ruii was almost fully lighted, Its bands turned luminous across Its crimson glow. Beneath the glade that I
t cast, the waters shivered, wind made visible.
A’i’ach felt the wind too, cool and murmurous. Each finest hair on his body responded. He needed but little thrust to hold his course, enough effort to give him a sense of his own strength and of being at one, in travel and destination, with his Swarm. Their globes surrounded him, palely iridescent, well-nigh hiding from him the ground over which they passed; he was among the highest up. Their life-scents overwhelmed all else which the air bore, sweet, heady, and they were singing together, hundreds of voices in chorus, so that their spirits might mingle and become Spirit, a foretaste of what awaited them in the far west. Tonight, when P’a crossed the face of Ruii, there would return the Shining Time. Already they rejoiced in the raptures ahead.
A’i’ach alone did not sing, nor did he lose more than a part of himself in dreams offcast and love. He was too aware of what he carried. The thing that the human had fastened to him weighed very little, but what it was putting into his soul was heavy and harsh. The whole Swarm knew about the dangers of attack, of course, and many clutched weapons—stones to drop or sharp-pointed branches shed by ü trees—in the tendrils that streamed under their globes. A’i’ach had a steel knife, his price for letting the human burden him. Yet it was not in the nature of the People to dread what might sink down upon them out of the future. A’i’ach was strangely changed by that which went on inside him.
The knowledge had come, he knew not how, slowly enough that he was not astonished by it. Instead, a grimness had meanwhile congealed. Somewhere in those hills and forests, a Beast ran that bore the same thing he did, that was also in ghostly Swarm-touch with a human. He could not guess what this might portend, save trouble of some kind for the People. He might well be unwise to ask. Therefore he had come to a resolve he realized was alien to his race: he would end the menace.
Since his eyes were set low on his body, he could not see the object secured on top, nor the radiance beaming upward from it. His companions could, though, and he had gotten a demonstration before he agreed to carry it. The beam was faint, faint, visible only at night and then only against a dark background. He would look for a shimmer among shadows on the land. Sooner or later, he would come upon it. The chance was not bad now at this, the Shining Time, when the Beasts would seek to kill People they knew would be gathered in vast numbers to revel.
A’i’ach had wanted the knife as a curiosity of possible usefulness. He meant to keep it in the boughs of a tree; when the mood struck him, he would experiment with it. A Person did once in a while employ a chance-found object, such as a sharp pebble, for some fleeting purpose, such as scooping open a crestflower pod to release its delicious seedlets upon the air. Perhaps with a knife he could shape wood into tools and have a stock of them always ready.
Given his new insight, A’i’ach saw what the blade was truly for. He could smite from above till a Beast was dead—no, the Beast.
A’i’ach was hunting. ***
Several hours before sundown, Hugh Brocket and his wife, Jannika Rezek, had been preparing for their night’s work when Chrisoula Gryparis arrived, much overdue. A storm had first grounded aircraft at Enrique and then, perversely moving west, forced her into a long detour on her way to Hansonia. She didn’t even see the Ring Ocean until she had traversed a good thousand kilometers of mainland, whereafter she must bend southward an equal distance to reach the big island.
“How lonely Port Kato looks from the air,” she remarked. Though accented, her English—the agreed-upon common language at this particular station—was fluent: one reason she had come here to investigate the possibility of taking a post.
“Because it is,” Jannika answered in her different accent. “A dozen scientists, twice as many juniors, and a few support personnel. That makes you extra welcome.”
“What, do you feel isolated?” Chrisoula wondered. “You can call to anywhere on Nearside that there is a holocom, can you not?”
“Yeah, or flit to a town on business or vacation or whatever,” Hugh said. “But no matter how stereo an image is and sounds, it’s only an image. You can’t go out with it for a drink after your conference is finished, can you? As for an actual visit, well, you’re soon back here among the same old faces. Outposts get pretty ingrown socially. You’ll find out, if you sign on.” In haste: “Not that I’m trying to discourage you. Jan’s right, we’d be more than happy to have somebody fresh join us.”
His own accent was due to history. English was his mother tongue, but he was third-generation Medean, which meant that his grandparents had left North America so long ago that speech back there had changed like everything else. To be sure, Chrisoula wasn’t exactly up-to-date, when a laser beam took almost fifty years to go from Sol to Colchis and the ship in which she had fared, unconscious and unaging, was considerably slower than that . . .
“Yes, from Earth!” Jannika’s voice glowed.
Chrisoula winced. “It was not happy on Earth when I left. Maybe things got better afterward. Please, I will talk about that later, but now I would like to look forward.”
Hugh patted her shoulder. She was fairly pretty, he thought: not in a class with Jan, which few women were, but still, he’d enjoy it if acquaintance developed bedward. Variety is the spice of wife.
“You really have had bad luck today, haven’t you?” he murmured. “Getting delayed till Roberto—uh, Dr. Venosta went out in the field—and Dr. Feng back to the Center with a batch of samples—” He referred to the chief biologist and the chief chemist. Chrisoula’s training was in biochemistry; it was hoped that she, lately off the latest of the rare starcraft, would contribute significantly to an understanding of life on Medea.
She smiled. “Well, then I will know others first, starting with you two nice people.”
Jannika shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “We are busy ourselves, soon to leave, and may not return until sunrise.”
“That is—how long? About thirty-six hours? Yes. Is that not long to be away in . . . what do you say? . . . this weird an environment?”
Hugh laughed. “It’s the business of a xenologist, which we both are,” he said. “Uh, I think I, at least, can spare a little time to show you around and introduce you and make you feel sort of at home.” Arriving as she did at a point in the cycle of watches when most folk were still asleep, Chrisoula had been conducted to his and Jannika’s quarters. They were early up, to make ready for their expedition.
Jannika gave him a hard glance. She saw a big man who reckoned his age at forty-one Terrestrial years: burly, a trifle awkward in his movements, beginning to show a slight paunch; craggy-featured, sandy-haired, blue-eyed; close-cropped, clean-shaven, but sloppily clad in tunic, trousers, and boots, the style of the miners among whom he had grown up. “I have not time,” she stated.
Hugh made an expansive gesture. “Sure, you just continue, dear.” He took Chrisoula under the elbow. “Come on, let’s wander.”
Bewildered, she accompanied him out of the cluttered hut. In the compound, she halted and stared about her as if this were her first sight of Medea.
Port Kato was indeed tiny. Not to disturb regional ecology with things like ultraviolet lamps above croplands and effluents off them, it drew its necessities from older and larger settlements on the Nearside mainland. Moreover, while close to the eastern edge of Hansonia, it stood a few kilometers inland, on high ground, as a precaution against Ring Ocean tides, which could get monstrous. Thus nature walled and roofed and weighed on the huddle of structures, wherever she looked—
—or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. In slightly lesser gravity than Earth’s, she had a bound to her step. The extra oxygen seemed to lend energy likewise, though her mucous membranes had not yet quite stopped smarting. Despite a tropical location, the air was balmy and not overly humid, for the island lay close enough to Farside to be cooled. It was full of pungencies, only a few of which she could remotely liken to anything familiar, such as musk or iodine. Foreign too were sounds—rustlings, trills, c
roakings, mumbles—which the dense atmosphere made loud in her ears.
The station itself had an outlandish aspect. Buildings were made of local materials to local design; even a radiant energy converter resembled nothing at home. Multiple shadows carried peculiar tints; in fact, every color was changed in this ruddy light. The trees that reared above the roof were of odd shapes, their foliage in hues of orange, yellow, and brown. Small things flitted among them or scuttled along their branches. Occasional glittery drifts in the breeze did not appear to be dust.
The sky was deep-toned. A few clouds were washed with faint pink and gold. The double sun Colchis—Castor C was suddenly too dry a name—was declining westward, both members so dim that she could safely gaze at them for a short while, Phrixus at close to its maximum angular separation from Helle.
Opposite them, Argo dominated heaven, as always on the inward-facing hemisphere of Medea. Here the primary planet hung low; treetops hid part of the great flattened disc. Daylight paled the redness of its heat, which would be lurid after dark. Nonetheless it was a colossus, as broad to the eye as fifteen or sixteen Lunas above Earth. The subtly chromatic bands and spots upon its face, ever-changing, were clouds more huge than continents and hurricane vortices that could have swallowed whole this moon upon which she stood.
Chrisoula shivered. “It . . . strikes me,” she whispered, “more than anywhere around Enrique or—or approaching from space . . . I have come elsewhere in the universe.”
Hugh laid an arm around her waist. Not being a glib man otherwise, he merely said, “Well this is different. That’s why Port Kato exists, you know. To study in depth an area that’s been isolated a while; they tell me the isthmus between Hansonia and the mainland disappeared fifteen thousand years ago. The local dromids, at least, never heard of humans before we arrived. The ouranids did get rumors, which may have influenced them a little, but surely not much.”
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