The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (21 page)

It was a brave and commendable program.
 

One day the Truthful-Woman-who-dwelt-in-a-Fountain had a visitor. It was a small boy, about eleven years old. He was crying. He’d been in his present form long enough to have relearned what Dream Earth—life, in fact—is all about. He was scared.
 

“They tell me you can see into the Ifalong.” He wore a lustrex shap from a forgotten era and he was twisting the fabric nervously between his fingers.
 

“That is sometimes true. What is the matter, boy?” There was no real sympathy in the Oracle’s voice. People had forgotten how to be moved by childhood’s woes.
 

“I want to know what will happen to me.”
 

“Whatever you want will happen. Surely you know that.”
 

“I may have made a mistake. I think I’ve done something stupid.”
 

“Everybody does. It doesn’t matter.”
 

“I think I’ve killed myself.”
 

Now the Oracle’s curiosity was aroused. “Tell me.”
 

“I Bigwished myself into this form five years ago. Life hasn’t been easy since. You’ve no idea how cruel people can be to a kid—all those psycaptains and Romans and Goths, they don’t give a damn. Being a kid is worse than being Yourself.”
 

And the Oracle delved into her memory and saw a face, smooth and beautiful, and a legend of horror that might have been more than a legend. It was a legend that, thousands of years later, she was destined to repeat to a fat and ungainly girl who could barely walk. Quickly dropping the train of thought, the Oracle said, “Perhaps you should have thought of that before you Bigwished.”
 

“I wanted to live life like a person of Old Earth. You know—grow up, grow old and die. I wanted to know what life was really like.”
 

“If you’re telling me you’ve changed your mind, fine. In fifty years or so, when you’ve built up the psy, Bigwish into something else, why don’t you?”
 

Now the boy’s voice broke. His Bigwish had been very comprehensive. “I won’t be able to build up the psy fast enough. It seems I’m slow to recover. Even if I never smallwish again it’ll take me at least eighty years to accumulate a Bigwish. I’ll probably be dead before then.”
 

The Oracle was silent for a long time. Her mind flicked through the Ifalong and she could see no way out. “You will die,” she said at last.
 

“You mean I won’t be able to Bigwish in time?”
 

“You won’t.”
 

“So what shall I do?” The voice was a wail of despair.
 

Maybe it was at that moment that the Oracle felt an awareness of what was in store for Mankind in the Ifalong. If so, it is paradoxical that the medium should have been a scared Dreamer who had bitten off too much. The Oracle didn’t answer for a long time. As she searched the happentracks, adding a human touch to the mechanical deliberations of the Rainbow, a panorama began to unfold that made her feel faint with its sheer immensity. She saw a coming-together and a branching apart, a discovery and a great Rebirth. Possibilities flooded through the synapses, data clicked in from all Earth and the far reaches of the Greataway. Rainbows from other Domes lent their input, and the Oracle let it all come, let it all come, sifted it. At last, very conscious that she was sitting right at the conjunction of radiating happen-tracks of enormous import, she said very slowly, having analyzed the probable effects of different word-patterns:
 

“Perhaps you should make the most of what time is left to you.”
 

“What do you suggest?”
 

“Man used to be creative. Perhaps too creative. But in recent millennia he found things too easy and Art disappeared. It’s easy to smallwish up a Picasso, but it’s a different matter to paint
Guernica.
I think perhaps you should create something.”
 

“Create what?”
 

“If I told you that, I’d be doing your work for you. I suggest you study Man’s early history, before he became absorbed in passive pursuits. Smallwish yourself a history terminal, let the data flow over you and immerse yourself in the thinking and emotions of the time. Then, when you’re ready, create something big. The ultimate work of art, based on an era before Art became a meaningless concept.”
 

The boy thought deeply. Tiny images went through his mind, traces of a wasted life that each Bigwish was supposed to erase but never quite did. Psycaptains and Romans and Goths, and women of all times. When at last he looked at the Oracle, his eyes were shining.
 

“I’ll do it,” he said.
 

The boy studied history, as the Oracle had suggested, and, as time went by, he tried everything. He painted abysmal pictures, he wrote verse that no minstrel has repeated since. He chopped chunky nudes from rock, he built a minareted temple that kindly Dream People quickly smallwished into nothingness. He was labeled a madman. He sang songs without melody in a tuneless voice, and people avoided him. And in no time at all, so it seemed, he was fourteen years old and passionately interested in the bodies of women. Fortunately for history, the fear of ultimate death was even stronger than this interest, and he channeled his burgeoning drives into his quest. It is fair to say that by now he probably had more drive than anybody in Dream Earth. So he continued to study with a growing frenzy while he wove monstrous tapestries, created and destroyed perfect football teams, designed dancing dinosaurs and spread across the countryside a sinuous and psychic River of Knowledge up which people swam, growing ever more learned as the strange water penetrated their pores, until, addicted, they could not rest until they reached the source. As their knowledge increased, so did their awareness of what they did
not
know—and so did their fear of what awesome Consciousness the source might be. In their minds the source gained a capital
S,
and the seeking of it lent a new meaning to life and the purpose of Mankind. It is perhaps significant that nobody ever reached the Source; their minds exploded with accumulated trivia long before that point. In their zeal they had forgotten that knowledge, to be useful, should have a directed purpose.
 

And if they had discovered the Source, they would have been disappointed. No august Being sat there on a throne waiting to welcome them into an unimaginable Kingdom. Instead there was a little black box and a multicolored cable leading to a concealed terminal of the Rainbow. It was nevertheless an incredible achievement on the boy’s part. He had succeeded in creating real objects on Dream Earth—the box and the cable—a feat that could normally only be matched by the Keepers. It didn’t happen again, not for millennia, not until the Cap of Knowledge appeared. The boy was unique. He was ready.
 

He was sensitive, at the most sensitive age. He had redirected urges. He dreamed of power, of might and thrust. Things from the past moved in majesty through his mind. He was still a child, and he thought as children always had—and the images began to clarify, began to take shape from a particular period of Earth’s history, from a fleeting instant in Time when Mankind had grown a million years in one century, a time of quick changes and therefore of haunting nostalgia. That was what art and beauty were all about: nostalgia. He woke one morning trembling at the discovery, knowing where art had gone. If nothing changes, then there can be no nostalgia for things past and lost. And without that beautiful sadness, art withers.
 

He sat on a grassy slope overlooking a valley, and another child’s mind sat in his mind, guiding him. There was a stream in the valley and he smallwished and threw a bridge across it, an old brick arch, moss-dappled and sturdy. Then he leveled the ground and laid a path of crushed rock. He placed balks of timber crosswise on the path and gave them a tar scent of their own. He placed two cast-iron chairs on each balk, then he laid twin gleaming rails in the chairs and pinned them in place with wooden blocks, so that they were exactly four feet, eight and one-half inches apart, an ancient measurement that the child’s mind within his mind had taught him. For a long time he sat there regarding the track through the valley and the little bridge.
 

Then, all psy’d out, he rested for nine years.
 

They came to him slowly, the Dream People. Over the years they dropped by, the mandarins and the troglodytes, Java Man and Miss Orange Blossom and the Travelers, and they admired his panorama. They were tempted to spoil it, to send a golden projectile rocketing along those rails, but they did-n’t. Instead, forgetting for a moment their relentless quest for pleasure, they gave a little of their psy and helped him.
 

A Captain Sylvia laid a frame. She laid it carefully, to the boy’s instructions, not sure what she was creating but wanting to help. She created a strangely wrought, roughly rectangular thing of steel, and placed it between the tracks. Then, wondering what had possessed her, she jetted to Jamaica. Everybody jetted to Jamaica, that era.
 

Now they came more often, partly out of a most unusual pity for this person who was destined to die, and partly from curiosity. At this stage, the boy could have become a cult figure and his work ruined by overenthusiastic helpers, but it didn’t happen. History does not relate why. A Shut-Out created the driving wheels, a bogus Thing-from-the-Nameless-Planet forgot to be fierce long enough to couple them and a sad Girl-who-was Herself spent a long time on the intricate axleboxes, finally threading the axles, pressing on the wheels and mounting them on the frames. For a few months—an incredibly short time in history—people rode the frame up and down the track, marveling at its mysterious ingenuity and the mind of the boy who had created it. For them it was enough, and for a while the boy had no more visitors.
 

Nine years and two months from the beginning, the boy had gained enough psy to build cylinders, pistons, connecting rods and valve gear. He was now a man, had patience and had come to terms with his existence. He knew he would complete the work in the end, and he therefore built carefully and well, expending a wealth of psy on detail, so that it became doubly difficult for any vandal to smallwish the thing away. Some of the Dream People even became interested enough to dig into the history of the period themselves and began to arrive with their own ideas. There was little confusion. They were all working toward a common goal, and that goal was beauty. They built a boiler of riveted copper and filled it with copper tubes, and each joint was perfect. They built the tender to match the engine, slab-sided and six-wheeled. They put on boiler fittings of the finest workmanship, and the chimney was a thing of love. Next came the painting and the embellishments: the gauges, the handrails, the whistle and the bell.
 

Finally they lit the fire and watched the boiler pressure rise, and stood around as the boy (who was now an old man) hauled on the regulator. Steam hissed into the cylinders, the piston rods slid smoothly and, with not so much as a smallwish from anybody there, the Locomotive moved forward with a sound and a smell that touched every Dream Person with magic.
 

History records that the old man died two days later, his life’s work complete. He was sure that he had created the ultimate work of art, and there was not a Dream Person present at that inaugural run who would not have agreed with him.
 

In one respect alone he failed. He had been unable to give the Locomotive a name. No mere word seemed adequate to express the feelings that the Locomotive aroused in its admirers.
 

In due course the Locomotive did acquire a name—one that was totally suitable—but nobody ever knew quite how or when it happened...
 

Meanwhile, the Dream People couldn’t leave the Locomotive alone, of course. It had captured their minds. They smallwished more track and a long train of carriages to go with it. They drove it around and held parties on it. And after a while they began to find the track too confining and the Earthbound journeys too simple.
 

So its travels gradually became more outlandish, until, one forgotten day, it transcended the realms of the Rainbow and ventured into a dimension of the Greataway, sustained by the imagination of its passengers.
 

It had, in fact, become a figment of the Outer Think.
 

“There is a strange beauty in this monster,” said Manuel, comparing the Locomotive with storms and hills and Belinda, his own yardsticks. The smell was of sulfur and hot oil and pounding metal, of smoke and steam. It touched something deep in his inherited memories and made him a little sad.
 

“Greetings, travelers.” A tall man stood before them, pink-cheeked and ageless, wearing a dark suit and a curious hat, tall and glossy black. “You wish to ride?”
 

“Yes.” Zozula watched the man uncertainly. Like the Locomotive, he might not be real at all; he could be a smallwish—the Composite Stationmaster. “Are there many passengers aboard?” he asked.
 

“More all the time.” The stationmaster shook his head slowly. “I honestly don’t know what the world’s coming to, I really don’t. Can you believe so many people are tired of life?”
 

“We’re not staying on. We have a particular destination in mind.”
 

He smiled sadly. “So they all say. Nobody will admit they’re taking the final trip. Nobody likes to admit that after they’ve done it all, there really
is
nothing more to do. Mark my words, you people, nobody ever gets off the Train.”
 

And with these portentous words he nodded to them, touched his hat and withdrew once more to his place among the pillars.
 

Zozula led the others forward. As he walked past the Locomotive he noticed for the first time a brass nameplate attached above the central splasher.