by Jerry
Why not ask for the race back? What countervailing factors were there? They said she could ask.
Not, she had to admit to herself, that she’d ever been a true mankind enthusiast. She’d liked some people, sure. But she’d never reached the point, never lived long enough, maybe never would have lived long enough, to accept the existence of others with that wholehearted acceptance with which she accepted her own.
Of course she felt very strongly the responsibility, (if her dreams weren’t just dreams,) of being the one who could decide, any night now, whether humanity should be brought to life again. But humanity had never turned her on. Of course she would like someone, almost anyone, to talk to, to write a diary for, to show things to, to sleep with . . . that was not meant, that was to be censored, please ignore . . . surely, you understand what goes through the mind, through the body, when one is alone. Forgive . . .
Who was there to understand? Who to forgive?
She eventually came to a conclusion, and with it, came back to awareness of her surroundings. She had attained different types of foliage than she was used to, less stark and noble, more entwined and languorous; her images of the south, bayou and magnolia and mangrove, seemed to be closer. South, she thought, how much further?
She found some hammocky roots and made herself comfortable, determined to do this thing right. The onus had fallen on her, for whyever, and she would pick it up and get it over with. She must be cunning and clever, pit herself against the Roanei for the lives of her own unreborn species. These Roanei will have their price. For sufficient reason, they’ll resurrect. Find the price, persuade them, convince them . . .
Sleepline, to be held into the night shadows. “What must we pay you for the rebirth of mankind? We’ll pay you anything. Name the price.”
And slept. And dreamed.
It crouches towering against the stars on a pinnacle ridge, far above her, black against the sky. Its clutching talons curve among the rocks, its hawk features jut proudly upwards against the cold sparks of fire. It is utterly awesome and arrogant.
She knows, in her dream that she sees the last, the resurrected speciman of the Mnestepoi. He is making his great pitch to the Roanei, and is he laying it on strong! Power he offers, in all four hands, and knowledge unimagined, and riches untold. It is a bit hard to follow, because it is full of concepts she can’t quite get her mind around, but the idea that the Mnestepoi hold the riches of all yearning, the knowledge of all ages, the powers of the universe, comes through loud and clear. And all these will be for the Roanei alone, if they’ll only bring the rest of the Mnestepoi back to life. The Roanei can rule the universe forever, cries out that thing on the crag, they will have the cosmic mastership the Mnestepoi had planned for themselves and almost attained, would have attained but for one little unforeseen accident which had erased them. All will be for the Roanei, the Mnestepoi will be their humble servants, if only they can live. If a few of them can live. If a single mate can live . . .
And from among the stars, from that distant wherever the Roanei have got to, comes the answer.
“What would we want with power, you call it, with riches, with knowledge? These mean nothing to us. We do not comprehend the value you put on these things, nor do we care. The answer to your request is no.”
And with a shriek of despairing rage, the last of the Mnestepoi hurls himself with ravening fury at the sky, hangs clawing against the stars, and plunges to sickening destruction on the cliffs beneath.
It shook her up a bit, that dream. She felt at the time that that creature could actually deliver what he promised. If ever she had felt the cold beat of power, it was in the looks and the speech of that monster. She had to admit she was sort of glad that the Roanei didn’t take him up on the proposal. Maybe she was being provincial, and the Mnestepoi were just grand folks when you got to know them, but still . . .
And she never thought again that the Roanei might be bribable—not with anything man had to offer . . .
She had stopped going south. She had run out of things she knew were good to eat, and had to face learning all over again, or staying up where things were more familiar. It had come to her with a sort of unpleasant realization that there wasn’t a thing known to be poison that wasn’t found out by a lot of people dying rather unpleasantly. As the last human being, there was need to be more careful of her existence. She’d have to accept a few cool nights.
So much for her half-planned scheme of getting across to Africa where her memory told her the Atlantic was narrower. (If she was in America, and if the continents hadn’t drifted) and seeing if any traces of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China could still be traced. She’d stay around here, wherever that was, and try to make friends with the animals that looked like rabbits but acted like squirrels; they looked the most tamable. She’d never been much for pets before, but circumstances alter cases.
She couldn’t forget her responsibility completely. It came creeping back into her mind in subtle ways, alternately making her curse herself, the Roanei, or the rest of humanity. Another day arrived when she realized she’d have to try again. She couldn’t let her own hang-ups keep her from seeing if she could bring back humanity. It didn’t matter what she thought of people, whether she liked them or not. It was a trust, like when her mother had given her money to buy something at the grocery, and she’d had to get what Mama wanted, even if she’d rather have had bubble gum instead. Anyway, if mankind can be brought back, she thought, it will have to include some psychoanalyst who can make me feel better about it all.
Man must be brought back; the Roanei have to be convinced we’re worth saving. Why? Why indeed?
She walked to the top of a hill to sleep. She gazed out to where a shallow sea drowsed on the horizon. The climate was definitely softer this life, yes, and healthier. She never felt the need of constructed shelter. She lay down under the deepening evening blue and pondered her approach.
She planned her dream query, etched her question with all her subtlety, and the selective memory of an arts major the first time around. She ran over in her mind all that man had made of wonder and beauty, for it was all part of the question. She let her mind, dimming toward sleep, dip and soar over the finest she knew of man’s creations; the spacious perspectives of the Taj Mahal, and the clumped hallelujah of Manhattan, Raphael’s wistful Madonnas and the bleak clarity of Hokusai’s ink line. She ran trippingly over Dante and Milton and Goethe, dipped into Keats, dabbled in Shelley, flirted with Swinburne, hovered over Blake, soaking in from each only the beauty, the feeling of joy she had received when she had first met them. In her preplanned tour she conjures up what she knows or imagines of Babylon and Athens and Samarkand, Louis XIV’s Versailles and Charles IPs London, Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Dostoevski and Klee and Melville and Miro and Bartok and Pynchon, and as she feels herself slipping into the nightly oblivion she rolls it all up in a single ball of ultimate question, a cry of the heart, “Can you let all this die? Don’t you care to bring back all this creation, this searching for beauty and truth and loveliness . . . this humanness back?”
And she falls asleep. The hard thing in this case being to avoid certain humannesses.
And she dreams.
They are the Coronolee. What they look like is irrelevant. It is what they touch that matters. They stroke the rocks and the trees till they respond in joy and beauty. They build mild cities that fondle the seas and skies, plant gardens that woo the earth; and grow in skill and art and scope with the ages, till all they handle becomes a wonder and a delight. All that see the works of the Coronolee exclaim “Ahhh, yes!”
They soften their suns to mellow hues that gentle all they fall upon. They form worlds from which one would willingly never part, where momentary existence is a flowing environmental caress. They meet other races and speak to them and touch them and somehow, species with hard edges and callous beginnings and mean needs begin to warm and soften and flow in beauty.
And of a mere moment, as the un
iverse plunges through time, the Coronolee are gone. Something had happened to them or been done to them or . . . anyway, it was so ugly, such bad art, that they went quietly.
And—how long after, who knows—the Roanei arrive and hear of the extinct Coronolee, still somewhat of an epic in that part of space at that time. And so, as they always do, the Roanei resurrect one member of that species, and leave it alone on the barren remains of one of the Coronol worlds, amid the relics and wreckage of departed splendour, and depart—leaving, of course, a dream-channel link. And the last of the Coronolee lives a short space, as their livespan goes, puttering about the shards of beauty, trying to set things to rights, and then asks from the depth of its heart and the height of its soul that its people might be brought back from nothingness to correct this ugliness. The Roanei hear immediately from the far places they were then in, and answer:
No. What value is there in the things your people have done? None of them matter to us at all.
And the dream link is broken forever. And the last Coronal dies, in shame and chagrin, at the ugliness of the world. And no one ever lives there again.
That was her dream. It was quite discouraging. In the face of what the Coronolee had achieved, even what she could rescue clinging to from the wrack of dream, what man ever did seemed not a little childish. If she’d ever loved anything human, it was the arts, but compared to what they were capable of, even Mozart and Seami looked like the triflings of a child that may amount to something someday if he ever grows up and doesn’t get too snotty.
And they didn’t impress the Roanei one smidgeon.
She had lost, she knew, another round.
She lived pleasantly enough under the trees, that might be oaks or beeches, or banyans for all she knew, surrounded by her squirabbits, and on the whole content. Time passed, usually without her noticing or being bothered by its passing, but once in a while she was reminded by something or other of time passing and duty undone, and went through a heavy guilt session.
It was really a bit chilling to think that she hadn’t yet actually asked for humanity to be brought back yet. She did have some symptoms of growing older, and someday she might drop dead of an aneurysm or something, and there’s the last chance gone for everybody that ever was. Even if she didn’t much believe it’s a chance, shouldn’t she at least try it? Think of all the people who are dead forever, and just maybe her mere asking could bring them back.
Sometimes, now she could never bring herself to say it out loud but she thought it . . . sometimes she thought she just didn’t want to bring anybody back. Did she really want any of them? Had they ever been at all important to her? Had she once been better off or more contented in the old human days?
On the other hand, she supposed she’d be very important to them, a sort of goddess at least, if she could have them all brought back . . . if they ever believed what she told them, that it was her that brought them back. She imagined all sorts of people would be quick to claim all kinds of things once they were brought back.
Finally, on the eve of a rare day of rolling thunder and rain, she looked out at the last fugitive wisps of sun through angry clouds, the first she’d seen of its light all day, and thought she had the answer. She dreaded using the dream channel again, but she would have to. She hoped it would be the last time.
She spent the evening thinking over the good and just and decent things men had (sometimes) done. She poured into a common pool her ideal portraits of Jesus and Buddha and Thomas Assisi and Florence Nightingale and little dutch boys at dikes and men in newspaper writeups who die saving children from burning buildings and her cousin Martha who broke an elbow getting a kitten out of a well. She wished she could add something of her own, but she well knew that she had never lived for anybody or died for anybody but herself. Maybe now she could make up for that. Alone on the wet earth, naked to the chill breeze, no human eye to see, she slept her question.
“I challenge you, Roanei. These are things men have done. Are you worse than man was? Can you do less for man than man, at his best, could do for his fellow man?”
She learned the answer.
It was early enough in the history of the cosmos that the galaxies were not far strewn as yet, and blazed in the sky as thick as stars.
She dreamt the ancient story of the Toomeer, or so the Roanei termed them. They were already of age when the Roanei were young, and they guided the Roanei and taught and aided and nurtured them, as they did so many of the races that first came into being on the earlier worlds of the earliest suns. They gave unstintingly of their time and their energy and their sustenance, and yet never seemed to call guilt into existence, as if they were rewarded simply by being permitted to give.
And the Roanei, young and precipitous race, found itself abruptly on the rim of annihilation, despite their unique talent of resurrection, or rather because of it. For the races of a galaxy rose against the arrogance and the parsimony of the Roanei in the use of their gift, and descended upon them to erase them totally.
And at the point of doom, unexpectedly, the Toomeer were there, interposing themselves between the furious attackers and the fleeing Roanei. This race is young and foolish, said the Toomeer, but let it live. We should all be for life together, not death. If you must slay, we are here . . . slay us.
And the attacking races did. In their fury and hate for the Roanei, they destroyed the intervening Toomeer to the last member of the species. But by the time the path to the Roanei lay clear again, the bloodlust had died, and they were aghast at what they had done, and at the virtue of the race they had destroyed. And they slunk back to their various home-worlds and what became of them is instructive, but not part of the dream in question.
But the Roanei followed their customary procedure. They resurrected one of the Toomeer, and told him he could request the resurrection of his species if he chose. Perhaps he never asked; certainly the Roanei never acted. They did not understand why the Toomeer had behaved in that suicidal manner, but presumably they had their own satisfactions in so doing. So the Roanei reasoned. The values of the Toomeer were as meaningless to them as those of the Mnestepoi or the Coronolee or Man. Of gratitude, they showed not a trace. The Toomeer have been extinct for many billion years.
The next day was a mental seething. She sat or paced for hours, gnashing, weeping, boiling over. Those Toomeer were teachers and parents and friends to the Roanei, and if they were allowed to rot forever, after they had died for the Roanei, she figured she wasn’t going to get far with an appeal to altruism.
In fact, she figured she’d give up.
No, wait. She could still ask them anyway.
Who was she trying to kid? The Roanei weren’t just giving out life for the asking, that was clear. And she had never forgotten that she could ask only once; she kept remembering the sausages on the nose. She’d better hold off on that ultimate request a little longer. Once she’d pulled that, there’d be nothing left.
That night, still with fury smouldering in her breast, and an icier determination than she’d ever known in either of her lives, she stood a while, sniffing the scents she had come to know, feeling the rough bark of the trees, tasting fear and anger in the back of her throat. She did not know the answer, but she would find out. She lay down. Sleep was long in coming as she worried her question into place.
“Show me those races who have been granted rebirth. Why were they resurrected?”
It was a sleep profoundly empty of dream.
The dreamlessness had the authoritative aura of the dreams. She knew that itself was the answer.
There were no such cases. There never had been one.
She was somewhat hindered in the comments she wished to make to the Roanei by a lack of adequate knowledge of their progenitive processes or their personal antipathies. But she requested them quite strongly to be so kind as to attempt to reproduce themselves in liaison with that lifeform most unbearably repugnant to them.
She would be damned if she’d give such
moral monsters the satisfaction of seeing her cringe. She’d been long taken for a sucker, but that was over. Now she’d just have to forget it.
She was sorry for the rest of mankind, but now she knew that nothing she could have done would have brought them back anyway.
Sadists!!!
Years passed over her head, long in the passing, short in looking back on them. She was getting old.
At times the thought flirted with her mind . . . should she not at least try? There is always a first time, people used to say, and perhaps the Roanei might make their first exception in favor of man.
She wouldn’t care to bet on that, though.
She had traveled long, and then settled long, developed a spot that was particularly hers in a world that was all hers in general, showed elderly crotchets to her line of squirabbits, forgot at times who and where she was.
A night came at last when, sitting on the shore of her own peculiar lake, she was in terror of death.
It had almost had her that day and was still waiting, invisibly final, in the shadows. She could no longer promise herself the whole night.
She felt she saw herself as she truly was—a lonely, selfish old woman. She never had cared for her fellow men. They could not have had a more indifferent advocate than herself.
She would not live forever. She felt an aura that told her she would not live out the next sleep. Let her at least go knowing she had done what she could. Let her pray for man to the Roanei.
The stars wheeled overhead. She could not do it. She could nod. She was terrified to sleep without, and yet she could not. All her life, both her lives, spun about her, and all the other lives waiting for her to speak out for them, and she could not. What kind of abominable thing, then, she thought, must I be?
