The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (14 page)

Kweilin had gathered sticks and built a fire in the pavilion, in a cloth-walled area open to the sky between the two chambers. The fire had been burning for two days, and the salamanders, sensing warmth, had drawn near. It was evening, the sky cloudless and the stars hard and brilliant, and Kweilin sat on a hassock filled with vicuna wool. Her mind traveled among the stars as she thought and speculated; yet she was ever alert for some sign from the Rock. Her face was hot with the flames.
 

A salamander dashed forward and seized a blazing brand.
 

Kweilin leaped up.
 

The creature had slipped under the loose foot of the cloth wall, and now it tried to retreat that way, dragging the fire behind it. Other salamanders appeared, taking their cue from their leader, pulling and worrying at the fire, scattering the glowing sticks. A fountain of sparks rose into the night air. The sinuous bodies of the salamanders glistened and writhed as they tugged the blazing sticks loose, oblivious of the heat, even enjoying it. Kweilin ran around the fire and tried to kick the salamanders away. Some of them were bigger than her foot and merely rolled with her kicks and returned.
 

A thread of flame ran up the pavilion wall.
 

Kweilin screamed. She began to beat at the flames with her hands, but the wall blazed on, billowing in with her blows. Other fires started as the salamanders escaped with their sticks, dragging them under the fabric. As she beat at the walls, a flame trickled up her robe. She felt it, saw it, tripped and fell. The flames were all around her, leaping against the black sky, consuming the dry fabric, while the salamanders darted here and there, running unharmed through the flames...
 

Later Kweilin found herself lying on the hard ground some distance away from the smoldering skeleton of the pavilion. She wanted to get back to her possessions, to use the Healing Stone there, but she felt too weak, and the dusting of snow was cool against her wounds. She lay and watched. The fabric had dropped from the frame of the pavilion like cooked skin and lay in a glowing heap.
 

It seemed to Kweilin that a huge salamander straddled the ruins, the dying flames licking his belly while he watched her with glowing, knowing eyes. Then he nodded his head a few times, in that mechanical way peculiar to cold-blooded creatures, and was gone.
 

Kweilin crawled back to the wreckage...
 

In later years Kweilin often wondered if the terror of the fire and the pain afterwards had caused that strange quirk that set her child apart from all other eremitas, who were perfect beings, if useless. She had reared the child to the best of her ability and, after a couple of centuries, she set him free to fend for himself. His name was Siang and he was to become a legend because of the Thing-he-did, later. Whether the Thing-he-did was a good thing or a bad thing will be forever debated among Dedos.
 

Starquin had no doubts. The Thing-that-Siang-did was to Starquin’s perfect mind so wrong, so contrary to the rules of interspecies contact, that he did something totally illogical, something that had never happened before.
 

Starquin lost his temper.
 

Somewhere up there, out there and everywhere, there was a flash of quick, hard psy that passed through every sentient creature in the Solar System, and many creatures beyond that system, too. They felt it as pain, as heat, as sorrow. They felt it for an instant; then it was gone. The more intelligent ones wondered for a moment, then shrugged in their animal way and carried on. The lower animals paused momentarily in their eating. Ten billion gossamer gadflies died.
 

The Thing-that-Siang-did is another story.
 

The thing that Starquin did may just possibly be true. It is said that he raged for a microsecond, then found an outlet. He vented his rage on the creature that had caused all the trouble: a small salamander that lived in a particular region of Pangaea, an amphibian that mated in warm ponds and gave birth to its young there—young that metamorphosed after a while, turning from a swimming water doll to a crawling land salamander.
 

To the salamander Starquin said: “
You will live in water all of your life. You will always be a white newt. Never again will you play with the fire you love so much. You will be born in water, you will live and die in water, and you will never, never feel the warmth of flames upon your flesh again.
”
 

Starquin knew that was the worst punishment of all, for a salamander.
 

The Dome had become hostile. The food chutes were delivering only sporadically and the food itself tasted unpleasant. The various robots still obeyed orders, but in a curiously sullen manner. The Rainbow thundered from time to time and the vibrations could be felt in distant regions of the Dome. The Cuidadors felt beleaguered. Only the Specialists seemed unperturbed, going about their duties cheerfully—with the exception of Brutus, who was morose and withdrawn.
 

“Still brooding about what I said,” concluded Juni irritably, not being a person to feel remorse. “As if we don’t have enough to worry about. And that Mole of yours doesn’t seem to have done much good, either, Zo.”
 

The disincorporation of the Mole had been an anticlimax. He had been prepared and bedded down by the raccoon-nurses, and the various electrodes and tubes had been attached. Zozula had thrown the switch personally, dispatching the brain-patterns of the Mole into the computer.
 

The Rainbow had displayed opaque clouds, as if considering the matter. Then there had been a brief growl that shook the room. Then nothing. The Mole had presumably been absorbed. Zozula had tuned into Dream Earth.
 

Nothing was changed. The parties went on; the adventurers fought wild beasts; the Love Palace was doing a roaring trade. This was unexpected, since ancient records indicated that the introduction of a new mind always resulted in a pause in events while Composite Reality adjusted. It was as though the Rainbow had simply rejected the Mole’s mind.
 

Unable to face the hostility of the Dome and the complaints of Juni, Zozula had gathered up the Girl and gone Outside.
 

The axolotls drowsed in a pool of warm water. They moved slowly under their shimmering ceiling, isolated from the world their ancestors had known. They were trapped in eternal childhood, but they didn’t know it. They felt like adults, and only Starquin knew what they had lost.
 

One of them began to eat in slow, huge gulps, consuming the larva of some insect before relapsing into its accustomed torpor. “Just a little, not a lot’ll satisfy an axolotl,” runs a local saying. They were undemanding creatures.
 

A shadow fell over the pool. Human voices spoke.
 

“I feel... strange. Maybe I should lie down for a while. I don’t seem to have any strength. My limbs feel so heavy.”
 

“It’ll take a while for your body to adjust.” Zozula regarded the Girl. He hadn’t been able to find clothes big enough for her, so he’d wrapped her in a blanket and half-carried her out of the Dome, past the Bowl, to this quiet place. He needed to adjust, too. The last few days had passed in a dream that was part nightmare.
 

“Why did you bring me here?” The Girl watched his face with baby-blue eyes. Her speech was slurred and awkward.
 

“You must become one of us—a Keeper. A Keeper has died, we need a replacement, and you have all the relevant data in your mind. So you must take her place. You must supervise the natural effects and live with us.”
 

“No!” The Girl made a sudden small gesture of impatience. “I’m bored with this game. This landscape—it’s dull. And you’re dull, too. Forgive me for mentioning it, but maybe you should change your type. I think I’ll smallwish away. I need to look at myself. I don’t feel right at all.”
 

In her drugged state, she still thought she was a Marilyn.
 

“Listen to me...”
 

“I wish...” Her plump face was set. “I wish I was back in the Pyrenees, fifty-two six hundred, or thereabouts.” She clenched her fists.
 

Nothing happened.
 

She opened her eyes, saw Zozula and the pool and, looming over everything, the giant Dome. “I must be out of psy,” she said miserably.
 

“You’re not out of psy. You’re in the real world.”
 

“I know that.”
 

“No, you don’t. You have no idea. What’s happened to you is stranger than you’ve ever dreamed of—and you’ve been dreaming all your life. Now, just sit still and listen...” And Zozula went on to tell the Girl everything: the Dream People and their lives of pretense in the Rainbow, the Do-Portal through which he’d brought her into the real world, the continents and the oceans and the Wild Humans living in their primitive villages along the coast, the horse clouds and the snake clouds—and the Chokes, which could kill you. He told her all this and more, while the sun dropped behind the hills and the shadows reached toward them. He told her about the other things—the legends and the half-truths, and his feeling that there was Something Else, a great Existence beyond the physical evidence of the real world.
 

And the Girl didn’t believe a word of it.
 

So Zozula resorted to the final proof.
 

He took a small knife from his pocket, drew her arm toward him and nicked the flesh, just below the elbow. Blood flowed.
 

“What did you do that for?” The Girl snatched her arm away, staring incredulously at the blood. “What have you done to me? How
could
you do this to me? Was that a smallwish? If it was, it was the cruelest one I’ve ever known.”
 

“It’s no smallwish, my dear. That cut is real. It’s the most real thing that ever happened to you.” Zozula’s heart bled, too.
 

“I feel so strange...” Her eyes were tightly closed against the pain. She’d never known pain before. “My arm, it...” She wanted to say “It
hurts
,” but she could not voice the concept. “I’ve never felt so unhappy in my life. Go away! Leave me alone!” Tears trickled from beneath her lids and, after a while, she opened her eyes to see if he was gone.
 

He still sat there, watching her. She smallwished again, and nothing happened. She opened her eyes. The pain was subsiding but the outrage remained. She looked at her arm, really seeing it for the first time. She stared. The drug was wearing off.
 

“Yes, it’s your arm,” said Zozula.
 

“But...” The cut forgotten, she prodded the plump flesh, kneaded it and noticed that her fingers were short and pudgy. “What’s happened to me?” she whispered, and she crawled to the edge of the pool.
 

And looked down at her reflection.
 

Come! Hear about the Trinity of legendary fame,
 

The Oldster and the Artist and the Girl-with-no-Name!
 

—Song of Earth
 

The Song of Earth tells many versions of that meeting between the Oldster and the Artist and the Girl-with-no-Name, each version reflecting the culture, the hopes and prejudices of the minstrel. One thing all versions have in common is the axolotl. The symbolism of that tiny creature has appealed to countless generations. It was the original neotenite. And in all those versions, the axolotl pool is just about the only thing that is correct.
 

In the Rainbow, however, reposes the truth of one particular happentrack. And on this happentrack there was no joyous clasping of hands, no sense of the fulfillment to come, no premonitions of glory.
 

What really happened was that Manuel arrived in the middle of an argument. The other two were hardly aware of his presence. Zozula looked a little sheepish and the Girl looked—well... grotesque. The sight of her caused Manuel to hesitate and to swallow unexpectedly, so that he almost retched.
 

She was sitting beside the pool like a sun-softened sack of lard, weeping.
 

“What kind of monster have you turned me into? I was beautiful, and it cost me a whole Bigwish. I was a Marilyn! And now you’ve spoiled it all. I’ll be stuck with this body for years, now!”
 

Manuel looked around, seeking something to divert her, but the evening landscape was bleak, the scanty wind-blown scrub like drowning fingers in a dusty sea, the wind suddenly chill, the axolotl pool dark and foreboding and the little creatures themselves moving below the surface like pale shadows of corruption.
 

He placed the Simulator on the ground. “I have something to show you,” he said tentatively. “This is going to make you feel better. It’s called ‘love.’”
 

Zozula gave him an impatient glance, then turned to the Girl again. “You remember Eulalie, the goddess who contacted you? She was my wife. She was dying, and we needed you to take her place. She put all the knowledge of the Dream Earth technology into your head.”
 

But the Girl wasn’t interested in that. “How can you say this is my real body? I know what I really look like. I spent years as Myself. I wasn’t all that pretty, but I liked Myself. That was the real me. But this body is some kind of a freak. In all the Bigwishes people have ever had, I’m sure they never thought up anything so repulsive as this. You must be sick, really sick.”
 

Zozula tried to explain. “Yourself isn’t really
yourself,
if you know what I mean. Yourself is what you might have looked like on a different happentrack, where neoteny hadn’t happened to people. Yourself is a white lie the Rainbow tells, to make everything seem a little more real. Living there in the Rainbow, able to do whatever they like, people can lose all pride. So the Rainbow tells them this one little lie: That people—real people—still look the way they used to millennia ago.”