Oberheim (Voices) Part 13

At his feet lay the scattered and broken armor, all that remained, of another who had tried. This melancholy work, drawn in the creature's own browning blood and severed foreclaw, had been its death-act of remembrance, its struggle still to forge some meaning from the emptiness of its failure. It had not been mai---he knew from the broken sh.e.l.l and the drawing---and this more than anything else, thundered shame at his growing feelings of surrender and despair. He remained silent, head down, wrapped in rage. At length he looked up to study the creature's last act of flesh.

It was the image, subtly changed, of a winged chivit, roaming insects living to the south of the mai. The outlines of its frame, like the edges of a fisherman's net, were opened at the center of the body and joined shut at the limbs and single arching wing. Its left foreleg and right hind (it had only four digits in all) extended from the main in almost Egyptian caricature, drawn with a trembling hand. The effect of the whole was that of a shriveled and shrunken Phoenix, macabrely adorning the tomb of some lost pharaoh. Subtly changed, like himself..... But the thing that held him---one strange detail. A smoky blur emanated outward from the body, like Spirit growing out of flesh. A fearful banshee image, or dying vision of the Life After?

The long journey.

Aura.

Breaking away at last he continued downward, seeking the source of the light, finding pa.s.sages as best he could. He tried to read what signs there were, the faint flux of incandescence, feeling called but never sure, taking what nourishment he could, for three days more. Always the strange tingling of flesh against his armor increased, as did internal body heat. And ever as he went he came across more of the striped-brown creatures, male centipedes, some running it seemed, from what he could not guess, all fearing him, all bearing the marks of battle. Yet none were ever wounded to the point of near-death, and all appeared strong of their kind. It was a puzzle he could not dissect.

Their fear held his confidence, but drawing steadily downward, he felt a growing reluctance to trespa.s.s the source of their being. It seemed to contradict all fairness that the way which led to meaning, if it did, lay through a world of savage (of this he was also quite sure), sniveling insects, who had in no way raised themselves above the animal. They were mindless and ugly, and his distaste for them would not be abated. Fatigue, too, was becoming unbearable, as the invisible force that beat back on him, a.s.saulting both mind and body, continued to grow with the light which was its sister sun.

On the fourth day, though time meant little in that place, pa.s.sing only in the world outside, he discovered the reason for his revulsion. The dull, sc.r.a.ping sounds of armor against stone, of mult.i.tudes locked in battle, had caught first at the edge of hearing, seeming unreal, then steadied, held, and increased as he went on. Till coming to the fissure-like opening of yet another vast cavern, he looked down on a sight that twisted his spirit like rope and squeezed hard at the knots.

Some twenty meters below him, as it were through a gla.s.sless window, he saw and understood at last the riddle of these pathetic creatures.

Newly hatched---the broken, swollen webs of multiple coc.o.o.ns lay many layers deep all around them---they were locked into countless battling pairs. Each separate fight was to the death, the victor sometimes stopping to eat a part of the vanquished, gaining strength, then moved on to grapple with others who had yet survived. By such attrition their numbers had already been reduced from thousands to hundreds, to what end he could not imagine.

Then he saw the females. Huge and bloated, they sat complacently on raised vantage points at the margins of the battlefield, awaiting the final conquerors. These victors he knew, from the signs he had already seen, would mate with them and then be cast out, possibly eaten, left to die as they would, the reason for their brief, wretched lives extinguished.

He watched them in dull horror, growing to intense pity and disgust.

For he knew that what he sought lay beyond them, and that its power, for good or ill, had nothing to do with them, and no influence whatever, either to elevate or corrupt. They were only here, and through some flaw of intelligence, or heart, or having no choice, they lived and died in a meaningless haste of reproduction.

He must past through them. He waited as long as his patience would hold, away from the window, not watching. When he looked in again many hours later, the number of fighting pairs had been reduced to perhaps sixteen. He crawled in through the high opening, moved carefully down the back-leaning arc of wall and onto a level with the combatants, all unnoticed. A narrow wrinkle in the chamber, nearly flat at the base, ran like a sunken path before him, dividing the battle in half. Having no choice, he began to walk the shallow gauntlet, moving stiffly, always ready for a fight.

First one pair and then another released their grip as they saw him, confused. Some, already on the verge of death, lay writhing and legless, fighting still. The four queens, each from its raised pedestal, looked on in disbelief: their sacred ritual had been disturbed. Simin moved steadily forward, staring down and backing off each male as he pa.s.sed. He was nearly halfway through.

Finally one of the females raised up her forward body, and began moving it back and forth like an impatient cobra. The male closest to her ---it seemed to Simin the largest he had seen---broke away and came forward, moving toward the dry ca.n.a.l where the intruder stood waiting.

Unlike the others it showed no outward fear. It advanced without hesitation, or thought, or much of anything except the blind mating aggression of its kind. It stopped only once, looking back at the female from the lip of the sunken path, then came forward with only one impulse in its mind. Kill him.

Simin had only a short time to plan his fight. As the creature drew nearer he opened his wings instinctively and strafed the air with his foreclaws. His wings! In all the time since finding the abyss he had forgotten them, first from the weak amnesia of near-death, then from simple disuse. With no more time to marvel he moved in a quick half-circle to avoid the lumbering bulk, then flitted up behind it onto the slanting edge of the rift. These short bursts of flight he repeated several times (the thought that he could fly to safety and forget this fight never occurred to him), searching for a weakness.

Though filled with a sullen rage, he knew there could be no mistakes.

Rising higher, he hovered briefly above his baffled foe, then swept down onto its back, and in three quick motions of jaws and foreclaw, tore off its head and left it to die.

Still full of bitter and unused anger he landed again on the plain closest to the female, clawing the rock as if clinging to a rope, as his blurring wings drummed threateningly. Then letting go he flew directly over her, and left the sorry ma.s.sacre behind.

With this action his patience expired. Landing as the far side of the chamber grew shallow, he walked on through a curving length of tunnel for some miles, until confronted by a three-directional branching of the pa.s.sageway. He followed the right-hand way first, and for a short time made good progress. But then it doubled back on him and finally ended, died, into a narrowing of stone through which he could not pa.s.s.

Furious, he worked his way back to the starting point, taking this time the central shaft, leading downward. The result was the same, though it took him much longer to realize. Returning again to the meeting of ways was now difficult, since in his haste he had been forced to take and re-take several turns in a compact but puzzling labyrinth, that he found in the end took him nowhere.

Coming again after many hours to the branching of paths, he tried to rest both mind and body, conceding the inevitable. His anger here was useless. It had only robbed him of strength and precious time, and he was no closer to a resolution of his bitter quest than he had ever been. And also, a peculiar yellow fear, such as he had seldom experienced in his life, was beginning to grow in him. At first he blamed himself, raging. But walking through the twisted tunnels of the labyrinth he had realized, suddenly, that it was not his fear alone.

His body was still not right, if wrong in a way that was hard to define, and there could be but one explanation for it. The mist, the growing light, was affecting his altered physiology. He searched within himself, bewildered, till Shannon's memory put a name to it.

RADIATION. A force that should not affect an insect, but which worked on those parts of his body that were yet human.

He rested for a time, but his rest was brief. The feelings of unease continued to grow in him; they would not be contained. The source of what he sought---he could now feel a faint throbbing in the stone around him---was a danger in itself, repulsing, even as it called to him. He must find it quickly, then be gone. For he knew that his time in those depths was limited. He gathered what courage and presence of mind he could, then pushed on, entering the left-hand pa.s.sage.

He summoned now all his underground instincts, honed by the long delvings of his life among the mai. In those days, a constant stream unbroken by sleep, he had endlessly searched out tunnels untraveled or long forgotten, returning ever and again to those that went deepest, learning the mazes, delving deeper still. Though what he sought there he could not have said.

The left-hand way was subtle, as he pa.s.sed onward through the narrow stone, with many turnings and side pa.s.sages. He held mostly to the main shaft, learning its direction, following it on its slow, steady course downward. Many times it narrowed, till he was ready to despair.

But always through perseverance and careful backtracking, he was able to find a way through.

The narrowing and tight touching of the walls began to frighten him.

By this, more than any other token, he knew that the growing fear inside him was not solely his own. Far back in the journey he had realized that in taking the quest he must know, in part, what it was to be human.

Perhaps the spirit of Shannon still lived more strongly than he knew.

And perhaps there were others as well. Often he had thought with human voice, human words, till now it was impossible to separate the two. He had known, and been, emotions that were not his own.....

But THIS fear. Sometimes from the deeps of his mind he could hear a howling as of many tormented voices, rising out of him like a driven, heart-frozen wind.

He stopped. He himself was afraid, and he did not know why. He must master it and go on. He must master it and go on. Go on.....

Resistance was thick around him, his body's weakness, till he felt that in standing still he walked against a current of water.

He hardened, and went forward. The pa.s.sage began to open again, growing wider. Several more of the branching ways, through a mesh of stone, and a straight, subtly rising tunnel lay before him. Far off in the distance he heard, unmistakably, a steady throbbing, echoing like a fall of water---the deep, rapid pulsing of a heart. He pushed on, harder, though the pulsing of yellow light grew stronger, pus.h.i.+ng back on him, darkening to gold, an airless wind urging him back.

The pa.s.sage seemed endless, and still it went on, with no indication..... Ahead of him, the tunnel opened out, almost beyond the edge of sight. He continued. Farther. He had reached it: the horn's spout. Over the lip, and in.....

The beginnings of the chamber greeted him like an opened book, lying on its bindings, leaning downward. The rock of that flattened wedge, angling slowly away from him, was ribbed and strangely symmetrical---smooth porous gray, but bathed in a strong golden light, inexplicably tinged dark crimson where it met a rise of stone. He was only vaguely aware that beyond this antechamber the ceiling warped high and huge, above a valley that dwarfed even the place of his birth. For here, as nowhere else beneath the surface of his world there were shadows, lengthening toward him to either side of the shallow, widening staircase. And for all the desperate haste of his journey, Simin could not yet go forward. He stood looking down at the two pillared sentinels in awe, the vast spherical expanse beyond. He little thought that he himself, standing before the rim of the long tunnel he had just traversed, his upper body and underside wreathed in red, formed an equally stunning and unlikely visage of life against the Void.

a.s.similation.

Two stone sentinels stood in perfect symmetry, like Roman statues, atop the angling walls that rose to either side of the stairway's end. The sunken plain lay beyond. Whether these silent watchers had been carved by Nature or intelligence it was impossible to say: perhaps meant to connote angry, reptilian merman rising out of the stone, perhaps roughly shaped bodies whose accidental carving held no meaning at all.

Here all boundary between the spiritual and the meaningless faded.

They stood silent, faces outward, guarding the plain below. He descended slowly until he stood between them, on the ripple of stone looking down.

The plain lay before him like a ma.s.sive wrinkled dish, bone-white and barren. He breathed deeply several times, not knowing why. His objective was a clear as the tolling of a bell.

A broad crater rested in the center of all, sinking out of sight, and from it came the deep tremor of sound, the slow throbbing of light that pervaded the underground vastness with its certain and unnerving presence. Everywhere the edges of floor and ceiling glowed red, as if from heat, and the brightness of yellow gold folded over and through him like a liquid current of sun and air, warming. Simin had not the heart to remain there long; he must descend now, or turn back in defeat. This place was the very nexus of his unspoken fears.

He descended into the Valley, and almost at once the wailing of human voices erupted in his ears, rising and falling in a discordant terror of mutilated pa.s.sions, scales without notes or boundaries. He moved on, oblivious, physically incapable of dealing with this fear.

His weakness cried out strange horrors; his strength was confused.

He continued, not knowing what else to do. The surface of that plain was cracked and uneven---warm, and unbearably long. The cacophony of human fears climbed and fell back, rising now as if engulfed in flame, then chilled, despairing.

HUMAN FEAR. At last he understood. He felt the presence of other minds so strongly that he wondered if Shannon were truly dead, and not merely the emissary of human suffering and grief. For this, surely, was an unearthly place of His world. The high ceiling, the infinite, trackless waste. The heat. Words raced through his beleaguered body, slowing, till with a dread he would not have thought possible..... The voice of a weary, tortured old man, his spirit broken in the end---a Jew, his lungs filled with poison---formed physically, undeniable, in his ears.

"Inferno."

He stopped, as if a razor had cloven him in two. It was there before him, all around. He could not go forward, or back. He was dying.

Yes, dying in that place, where the river of his dreams, fallen to a trickle, had at last died into unconquerable sand. He stood frozen in terror. To breathe was a pointless misery. There was nothing---alone---in that hollow place but death.

He knew not where he got the strength, or desperation. He lifted the first of his walking legs, moved it forward. It touched the ground, a little farther ahead. He moved the next, and then the next. He staggered forward, feeling a will such as he had never known hardening out of his weakness and despair. He was terrified, in pain. Burning with fever. But he moved.

With this action the resistance seemed to falter, the wailing of human pa.s.sions to subside. But only for a moment. They redoubled their a.s.sault---the current against him was physical---but broke against his stubborn movement like a wall of water against stone. He continued.

The sand of many hours flowed past him.

He was nearing the crater, now certain he would die. If only by his death he could achieve for Shannon, and for the other..... He forced a foreclaw to shackle the edge of the crater, looking down. Determined.

The dry heat of that place was unbearable; and still distance defied him. A silver-white core, cruel mockery of the Carrier stone, glowed at the center of the broken-rock pit. From within came the voices, the fever, the Heat. Yet this was his only quest. He must. . .TOUCH it..... Must.

He could not walk; his legs would no longer carry him. With a weak spasm of his hind and a pathetic flutter of wings, he pushed himself over the edge and slid, rolled across stones, folding his wings just in time, to tumble down a steep slope then land, legs folded beneath him gripping hot stones, perhaps a hundred yards from all his desire.