Gods of the Greataway (11 page)

And the little model hung in the air, sustained only by David’s mind.

Nobody would need Benders in the future … possibly. The child, small, vulnerable, smiled proudly and wriggled, his back pressing against the exit hatch.

“David,” said LeBrun after a long pause. “Come away from that hatch — it’s dangerous. We must go and find your mother. I … want to talk to her …” He stooped, and gently gathered the child into his arms.

David, a little disappointed at the lack of reaction to his trick, wondered briefly why his grandfather looked so old, so scared.

*

“They didn’t look back,” said Shenshi. “Humans never did, in those days. It was Onward and Outward, always. They isolated the gene that allowed that young boy to tap into the psetic lines and they called it “mynde,” and they reduplicated it and improved it — they were good at that, given the first lucky mutation. Then they spilled into the Greataway.

“In due course they encountered an enemy, who had a weapon against which they could do little. This weapon was particularly terrible for creatures so short-lived as humans, because its effect was to age them well before their time. Many of Earth’s colonies collapsed as quickly as they were founded. Mankind was driven back through light-year after light-year, dimension after dimension, until it was trapped in a tiny corner of the Greataway little more than sixty light-years across, with Earth at its center.

“Starquin was watching with interest. He knew what would happen. He was sitting in the Greataway and encompassing the Solar System and a couple of nearby stars, at the time. Mankind, at bay, turned to its own genes for help and created a monstrous trio of pseudohumans who became known as the Three Madmen of Munich. These creatures were sent into the Greataway and they placed what can only be called Hate Bombs at the Pockets in psetic lines.

“Greataway
travel depends on mynde, and mynde is very largely made up of love. Nobody could get past the Hate Bombs. They sealed Earth off from their enemy. They also sealed Earth off from its remaining colonies.

“And they sealed Starquin in. He’s up there now, trapped. He’s been there for almost fifty thousand years, unable to wander free among the galaxies.

“Our Purpose is to release him.”

Ana spoke tentatively, not wishing to sound skeptical about the great story her mother had told. “If Starquin can foretell the Ifalong, why did he allow himself to be trapped?”

“It’s easier to foretell the Ifalong than to change it,” replied her mother. “And you must remember, happentracks are infinite. On many happentracks Starquin was not trapped. But we, in the here and now, exist on a happentrack where he was. So we must work toward freeing him.”

“How?”

Now Shenshi said the words she’d said so often before, but this time they made sense to Ana.

“Manuel, Zozula and the Girl form the Triad — as it will be known in ages to come. They will remove the Hate Bombs and free Starquin. The means are not clear, and perhaps they will do it in many different ways on many different happentracks. But in the Ifalong, when all the stories and songs and legends and facts have coalesced into something approaching truth, Mankind will tell of the Triad in its Song of Earth. The minstrels will sing a song that starts like this:

“We must make it happen,” said Shenshi.

O
UR TALE CONTINUES WITH THE GROUP

OF STORIES AND LEGENDS KNOWN AS

M
ANKIND’S
C
RADLE

T
here are no
half
measures
in legends. They deal with absolutes — with men of chivalry, with monsters of fearsome aspect, with villains of unspeakable evil. The women in legends are beautiful. Often they are the most beautiful women in the world; occasionally, in all of Time, too.

The Song of Earth is a heady liquor, a mash of legends, facts and half-truths brewed in the minds of minstrels and distilled into their lyrics. Out of all this has emerged one perfect woman. She was brave and strong and clever. She was an ancient tiger-woman from the chromosome factory of Mordecai N. Whirst. She was the captain of a great starship named the Golden Whip, which sailed the tides of High Space less than a thousand years before little David LeBrun made nonsense of it all with his mynde.

Her name was Captain Spring, and she was the most beautiful woman who ever lived — so the minstrels say. She mothered a famous line, including Karina, who was supposed to be a felina; John, who gave his name to an Age of Man; and Jimbo, a poet. And there was Antonio, another poet.

As if all that was not enough, she accidentally brought to Earth alien parasites known as the Macrobes, which changed Mankind. She did this in the year 91,702 Cyclic. Over fifty thousand years later, a priest in Pu’este was-using these same parasites for the purpose of prolonging his life. Dad Ose and the people of that period called this process the Inner Think.

It is sometimes said
that the Macrobes spread through the human race like wildfire, but this is not so. In fact, the process was gradual and accompanied by setbacks, such as the infamous Pogrom of the Hosts, when many millions of Macrobe-carrying humans were wiped out by enemies jealous of their longevity.

The chief characteristic of the Macrobes was their intense desire to live. Because of this, they made sure their host lived, too. However, incidents such as the Pogrom caused them to revise their tactics. They evolved into a recessive gene and lay low for thousands of years.

*

“It was a paradox,” said Shenshi. “Once the Pogrom was over and it became clear that the Macrobes still existed — and would always exist — Mankind began to accept them as beneficial. After all, they could extend the life of a man for several hundred years. What could be better?”

“So what was the paradox?” asked Ana.

“Humans lost all incentive. The drive and urgency went out of them. What was the hurry, when suddenly they had a life-span of centuries to play with? They called it the Age of Regression, when people began to drift back into their Domes for entertainment. They lay down and plugged themselves into Dream Earth, and there they stayed.”

“I remember that happening,” said Ana. “It was quite a gradual thing. Then one day I realized there were two types of humans: the people in the Domes, and the Wild Humans outside.”

Shenshi said, “The people in the Domes were the ones with Macrobes, of course. And now the Macrobes were trapped, because human reproduction had virtually ceased. The beginnings of neoteny had been observed in the Dome people, and the Cuidadors had set up an experimental station on another planet, well away from Earthly influences, where they were trying to breed humans with normal characteristics. They called it the People Planet, and it was founded in 107,357 Cyclic.

“The
Cuidadors began to take an interest in the Wild Humans, seeking suitable breeding stock. And the Macrobes realized they must obtain a foothold on the People Planet and in the breeding program if they were to survive.

“And I scanned the Ifalong, and foresaw a happentrack on which Starquin was freed from his imprisonment. So I sent you into Puerto Este …”

“I remember that day,” said Ana thoughtfully. “And the boy — Antonio, was it? He was a nice boy.” She smiled reminiscently.

“The recessive gene had surfaced in him.”

“You make it sound so clinical, Mother. Does there always have to be a reason for niceness?”

“Always,” said Shenshi.

*

She was a foreign girl; he could tell that by her complexion. She was paler than the local girls, and her features more delicate. She had arrived some months ago and had set up a little shop in an old stone cottage near the beach. Her name was foreign, too — a curious name, at first lumpy on his tongue like clotted uida, but soon gaining a poetry and a meaning of its own.

He watched her each morning as she walked to the beach in the early sun, picking her way over the pebbles as though they were hot coals — she was not yet accustomed to going barefoot — then striding across the sand toward the water with her head high, never glancing his way as he lay beside a grass-tipped dune. Each day he moved a little closer to her accustomed route, but still she didn’t look at him. Chin up, eyes ahead, she moved with a swing of rhythmic poetry in her strong thighs and her slender waist. After a week she was tanned, but it was a golden tan, and in the boy’s eyes the local girls with their dark skins looked merely dirty beside her. They taunted him, too, suspecting his enchantment.

“You’re
too young for her, Antonio! You’re only a child!”

Possibly she was two years older than he, but he was at that age — or maybe was that type of person — to dismiss this as irrelevant. She was a beautiful creature and he loved her, but he’d never spoken to her, and perhaps he never would. Unless that occasion arose which he often dreamed of, when he heard her screaming from the surf in danger of her life, and he swam out and saved her. Then she would thank him, clinging to him, and he would say with mature casualness, “It was nothing. You’re shivering. Come along to my place and I’ll make you a hot drink.”

Antonio’s place was a stone cottage like all the other stone cottages, thick-walled and cool in summer, warm in winter when he covered the windows and stacked the fire high. It contained a bed fashioned from driftwood, a chair and table of similar construction, a few metal pots left by the previous owner, some simple tools, a pile of vicuna skins (on which she would lie, her shivering abating, her eyes warm as she watched him heat a potion of milk, ground coffee beans and peyote) and Antonio’s prized possession, a shelf of books. Many years ago Antonio, an introverted child, had taught himself to read from a cache of books he’d found in a buried village. Not many people in Puerto Este could boast of this accomplishment.

Or his other accomplishment, about which he had never told anyone …

The interior walls of the cottage were worn smooth with the occupancy of millennia. The cracks held little curios — bits of beach-worn glass, shells, unidentifiable artifacts from long ago. The surface of many larger stones bore carvings of stylized fish and whales, goats and guanacos. And one stone, near the fireplace, bore an etched symbol. Probably no one in the village except Antonio knew what it meant.

Under the symbol was a shelf, and on the shelf sat a pot of flowers. On a rock projecting from the wall below the flowers lay a piece of white bark, with characters inscribed on it with a charred stick. Antonio was writing a poem.

He’d never written a poem before, although he had a book of poems that he frequently read, feeling strange stirrings within him at their rhythms, sounds and emotions. So it seemed appropriate that he write the girl a poem. It was taking a long time, although it was a short poem. The bark was smudged from many erasures. In a few days it would be finished, even though Antonio felt there was an infinity of ways in which the choice and setting of words could be improved.

It had to be finished
soon, because Antonio had seen Hernando, a much older boy, muscled and swarthy and strong, talking to the girl yesterday. So — in a couple of days he would give her the poem and she would melt in his arms, just as if he’d saved her life. He selected a charred stick from the fireplace and began to edit, to perfect.

He wondered why things should be so complicated, here in the simple surroundings of Puerto Este. In his books he’d read of other times when the world teemed with people, clustered in large cities in their millions, when even in the countryside every available hectare was cultivated. Strange social structures had held sway, and complex laws that were altered many times in a lifetime. How could a person keep up, in those far-off days? How could one handle differing currencies, differing languages, different customs as he rushed from one city to another? And the laws … How could one stay out of jail?

Things were so much simpler here and now. The mountains, the village, the sea. The sun and the sand. And the girl …

No, it was not simple. Man could still create complications within his own mind. Otherwise he would have walked right up to the girl and said, “You are beautiful and I love you. Come and live with me in my cottage …” Now
that
was simple. That was real poetry.

Love can be pain. Antonio endured the pain because it was outweighed by the joy. And in a very short time, he had finished the poem as best he could. It was not perfect and it didn’t rhyme, and in a way it contradicted itself by denying the need for its own existence. Yet its uncomplicated statement found its way into history.

And the girl was
tanned and straight, with hair the color of a fair sunset and she stepped delicately over the pebbles, although her feet were now becoming accustomed to the rough ground. Now she was on the sand, wearing two pieces of bright dyed leather, walking to the waves, toward the dune where Antonio lolled with seeming indifference. She didn’t glance at him yet. She didn’t glance at the little knot of spectators who leaned on a broken groyne nearby, either. These were Antonio’s contemporaries, who suspected he was about to make a fool of himself and wanted to see it happen.