by Jerry
“I think for the beings who implanted the Glyphics we’re just background illumination. They’ve strung the stars with sources of intelligence, like lights on a Christmas tree, or maybe campfires to ward off the cold. But fires can’t be allowed to burn too hot, they can’t be allowed to get out of control. The Bugs realized that at the end. They were smarter than us and that’s probably why they died. Maybe it’s not the limiter that kills you but the awareness of it.”
Mikey had lapsed into a silence from which he would never emerge. I didn’t know that at the time so I shrugged and continued. “Whatever happens we won’t be allowed to develop further. Perhaps if we can learn to accept it we might survive.”
I didn’t believe it, then or now. The Glyphics make us strive, make us chafe against the chains. Intelligence is a matter of struggling to push back the limits.
The belittling awareness of ultimate limitation, reached now and not at some faraway endpoint in humankind’s glorious future, will eat its way into our collective psyche. It’d killed the Builders in five of their generations, the Bugs in barely two of theirs.
I’m not sure we’ll take that route. I don’t think we’ll just lie down and die, but at the same time we’re not great when it comes to acceptance. Far from it. We rebel against everything sooner or later.
In the future I see great genocidal armadas setting sail across the gulfs of space to extinguish some of the other bright “lights” in a vain attempt to signal our defiance to the gods.
Of course it won’t do any good. After all, would you tolerate any defiance from a light bulb?
DEAD GODS
Robert Sampson
The Irrawaddy River has sixty mouths and they gush a thick brown spew that is the flesh stripped from the northern Burmese mountains.
Up that river, Coppard and I traveled with an escort of five government soldiers. That was decades ago, years beyond counting. Our business was government business, and therefore urgent. Or so we had been assured by the Rangoon official who had pronounced himself Coppard’s true friend.
The business was simply to ascend the Irrawaddy to Pagan. There we would hunt out a certain Frenchman and secure from him a certain scrap of paper, the merest thing, quite unimportant, although described to us with all possible, if tedious, precision.
For this simple labor, the government—Coppard’s friend assured us—would generously extend to us specific commercial privileges in Rangoon. These would no doubt compensate us for the seven-hundred-mile round trip. No doubt at all.
We traveled on a fat little white sternwheeler which methodically plodded along the chocolate-colored river, not stopping often. In Burmese terms, we did not stop often. In Western terms, we dallied interminably.
Our sluggish movement tore at Coppard’s nerves. He was a mocking lean man, perhaps near fifty, dry and long and quietly savage. Once he had lectured as a professor of Comparative Anthropology. In his daily life, he retained some of the confidences and certitudes of his former profession.
“Now, Captain,” he would say, jocular and malicious, “how may we best squander today? In torpid languor, Captain, drifting through the usual dream?”
Grinning narrowly, he opened and closed his gold cigarette case, producing a series of tart snaps. Although he could speak several Burmese dialects with disdainful ease, his remarks to the captain were invariably in English.
The captain, an aged little man armored in serenity, smiled vaguely and strolled forward into the intense afternoon light. Later we would tie up at a narrow dock, where the East, with vehement gesture and excited voice, swarmed about the ship in boiling frenzy, accomplishing in hours what should have taken minutes.
“The ship,” I pointed out, “follows a routine of planned stops. Our business is quite secondary to its schedule.”
Coppard glanced obliquely at me, contemptuous, as usual, of my remarks. “Government business, Mr. Stanton. Which business is temporarily our own.”
“Only temporarily,” I said. And felt the hot bite of shame at my weak answer. How difficult to sustain civility when animosity constantly ballooned between us.
“Must you invariably excuse the incompetent?” he asked, snapping the gold case. “A quaint concept, Mr. Stanton. Although not one, I surmise, to improve your financial status.”
“That is your department, I believe,” I told him, and moved away, feeling fear, like a rancid cloud, crowd around my heart. All I owned was in the business we jointly brought to Rangoon. If that failed, I failed. The danger ached in me.
Eventually we reached Pagan, the ancient capital of Burma. Misfortune had reduced it to 3,500 inhabitants and crumbled away the astounding swarm of its temples to perhaps two thousand.
A horse-drawn cart bumped us into the town. There, we immediately learned that the Frenchman had died, an entirely natural death by all accounts. Among his immense and raffish collection of papers, we found no trace of that scrap which would have been of such value to the Burmese government. Or conceivably to the Rangoon official. Nor did such a scrap reappear in anyone’s hands, then or later. Who the man was or why it was preferable that he be sought by Westerners or what value resided in his ephemeral paper are unanswerable mysteries.
Our mission had failed miserably. But we did not enjoy the consolation of a hasty retreat from the scene of the disaster. The steamer and its amiable captain had plodded north to Mandalay and would not return for three days.
For three days, Coppard and I and the five soldiers would have to content ourselves with the pleasures of Pagan. These were few and dubious, if you did not care to visit temples. By the afternoon of the first day, boredom lay on us like gray smoke.
Pagan has no hotels. We found refuge at the eight-room government guest house, built by the British in 1922 to accommodate the Prince of Wales. From the veranda, we could look up into a powder-blue sky glowing with heat. For ten weeks, it had not rained. We sat silently. It was absurd to reiterate our failure and the consequent collapse of our plans. If you fail, do so without whimpering. And avoid disguising your whimpering beneath endless recapitulation and assessment. So many of our countrymen in the Far East never learn this.
While we sat in this grim state of mind, a tiny brown man crossed the veranda and diffidently approached our table.
“Reverend sirs,” he whispered in a fragile voice, “to your attention may I humbly commend myself. To you I bring discussion of interest and importance, were you to hear me.”
He was as delicate as a paper toy. He wore the universal costume of sandals, a white shirt, and a half sarong—this of dark brown checks. His face was richly wrinkled, puckered, seamed, and grooved, as if he wore a larger man’s skin.
Apology rode behind his eyes. And there was some other emotion—shame, perhaps, or grief. Some strong emotional presence radiating from him as pronounced as a magnetic field.
He introduced himself. He was U Saya Gyi, a religious man, although not a Buddhist. We smiled meager smiles in our boredom and offered him mint tea.
Then, apologetically, stumbling through English sentences as elaborate as wedding cakes, he told us of the Wonderful Place.
Coppard eyed me and I eyed my glass. Both of us knew of The Wonderful Place. Wherever you go in the Far East, you find a man eager to escort you there.
It is a place rich and startling and strange, “quite studded with gems, I assure you, believed to be carved by the genii.” The location is known only to him, who discovered it, by the merest chance, only a few nights ago, before the arrival of your lordly royalnesses.
To visit The Wonderful Place costs nothing—a few days’ wages for the discoverer to lead you to a scattering of blocks, a low wall shattered by jungle. Or perhaps to an ambush, with gunsmoke sudden among the sage-green trees and men with misshapen knives howling as they cut you down for your shoes and wrist watch.
We were familiar with the story of The Wonderful Place, and the consequences of seeking it.
But U Saya Gyi’s place differed from
all the rest. It was not above ground, but under. It possessed no gems, no carvings, no whisper of pomp. It was, instead, a holy place, the temple of Haniman, his resting place.
“Haniman,” I said. “Sounds German.”
Coppard snorted. “You’re not four hundred miles from the Andaman Islands,” he said. “ ‘Man’ is a common suffix.”
To U Saya Gyi, he said, “And who was Haniman?” I saw his mouth twist derisively as he asked, for Coppard held strong opinions about the gods of Asia.
“Most worshipful sirs, it is delightful for me to speak of the Lord Haniman, whose name is flowers in the mouth. For he was first of all and lived in the great place, constantly thinking, as you must suppose, most Reverend Sirs. Thinking thoughts as sweet as a young girl’s hair.”
“Creation myth,” I muttered.
The grin grew corrosive along Coppard’s lips. “Learn to listen, Mr. Stanton,” he muttered.
I listened. But to record U Saya Gyi’s fatiguing diction is to make him ridiculous. He was not. Struggling among the traps of our lethal tongue, he attempted to describe the events of a complex mythology. To handicap himself even more completely, he studded his speech with elaborate professions of respect and admiration for us. Nothing I said could change his certainty that Westerners craved such obeisance—no doubt for their own inscrutable reasons.
Eliminating the rhetorical glories, he said this:
Haniman lived at the beginning of the world. There were no men, no women, not one. Being lonely, he took mud from the dark depths of the river and shaped men and women. All these were black. From the bank he took pale clay and made white men. Finally, from the sunlit river bottom mud, he formed first the yellow, then the brown races. All these he placed in the world to go their way.
Now Haniman climbed the mountains to rest and watch. But the mountains were jagged and high. He was so far away he could not see how his people conducted the world. So he said, “I will go now and see.”
But while Haniman had rested, the mountain peaks had grown high and sharp and terrible. He could not come down. So he went to see in this way:
In a rose and teak city lived a mighty Sultan whose wife bore him a daughter. As she held up the newborn child, she found it swollen by pregnancy. Then from the womb of that infant emerged Haniman as a tiny babe. This was a singular wonder and noted by many.
For twenty-eight years, Haniman lived among men. As he grew to manhood, he saw that men, by some inner spoilage, possibly because they were made of mud, achieved wickedness more frequently than happiness. Although they were wicked, they were children formed by his hand. And so he decided to die for them, that they might return to serenity.
Rising up, he gathered his followers, and rode an ox and a tiger into the jungle.
Once in the jungle, under the great leaves, the ox gored him. The tiger ate his body, all but the bones. So he was sacrificed. Afterward, his worshippers dug a temple long and deep in the earth and carried his bones there. Then they returned to the surface and squatted in the sun, waiting for Haniman to be reborn and come among them again, telling of wonders. But although they waited five years and five years more, he did not appear.
So they went their separate ways across the world. Presently all had forgotten Haniman, who waited patiently in his temple.
“Reverend Sirs, to make an ending to this overlong and unusually interesting adventure I have the delight of relating for your joy, I have most recently found among the five thousand temples of Pagan, so close your honors may rise from your chairs and even now cast your remarkable eyes full against it, the indeed true temple of Haniman, most distinctly and without doubt adorned by ox and tiger on the outward walls.”
Coppard lifted his eye to let me see the bitter brightness of it. He asked: “You wish us to accompany you there?”
“If it be your esteemed pleasure to gaze where Haniman waits unsleeping, it would be to me the world’s delight to guide your way.”
“We have little money,” Coppard said. Cold malice edged his face.
“But money,” U Saya Gyi said, vaguely confused. “No need for money. To go a few miles, a few miles only, is not for require money, Honorable sir.”
“Fine,” Coppard said. “No money. And we shall be accompanied by our escort. Five soldiers, government soldiers, with their rifles.”
U Saya Gyi’s face flared with joy. Bending over the table, he extended his tiny hand to touch the cuff of Coppard’s coat, the barest touch, one fragile caress of thanks.
Head bent in the savage light, he whispered, “It will of so much delight be to the Wonderful Haniman.”
In early morning, next day, we hired two horse carts and rode east through Pagan—five soldiers, Coppard, and myself, and U Saya Gyi. On either side of the red dirt road stretched neat fields of melons and peanut. Among these lifted the gray stone Buddhist temples of Pagan in all their multitudes. Dozens rose in the fields, and more crowded behind until their numbers faded among distant trees. They were temples, not shrines, being sixty or seventy feet high, and built in three terraces capped by an immense stone bell, itself thirty feet tall.
Every flat surface of these structures fumed with grass, emerald against ancient stone. Fat little trees swelled at their bases. Across the stone wandered thick vines, like the veins on the back of a man’s hand.
Not all temples remained derelict. Several stood cleared of vegetation. In the distance, others, freshly white-washed, glared like new ivory plunged into the sedate brown-and-green fields.
It was not to a restored temple that U Saya Gyi led us, but to a low mound, crawling with vines. Under the leaves showed tumbled brick and limestone slabs. Whether the mound represented the wreck of a temple or some lesser ruin, I do not know.
Tugging aside a sheet of vines, U Saya Gyi disclosed two time-eroded pillars. Faint symbols had been chiseled into these.
“Tiger and ox,” he cried. But who could tell.
Behind the pillars opened a black slit into the mound. From that slit crept a hint of heat, a vague dryness, the dark breath of Haniman’s resting place.
Coppard opened the bag containing the flashlights. To the sergeant of the troops, he said, “Wait and watch. We’ll return in an hour.”
“There are cobras in these ruins,” said the sergeant, grimly rigid.
“No, Respected Leader,” U Saya Gyi whispered. “This is a holy place quite absent in cobras.”
“Let us see,” Coppard said and pushed aside the vines.
The entrance plunged from the light, deeply padded by years of decayed leaves. Among the debris lay hundreds of small bones, brown and white, quite dry.
The path lost its overburden of leaf trash and became limestone slabs descending a shallow incline. The harsh air cooled. Echoes followed us twenty feet down to a wide passage smelling of dusty stone. From the ceiling, six feet above us, dangled a beard of white and yellow roots, groping blindly toward our heads.
My light glided along the gray slab walls, exquisitely fit together. A shallow chamber opened left, brimming with darkness.
“Watch your feet,” Coppard said brusquely. From beneath his coat slipped a thick-bodied pistol.
U Saya Gyi turned his head. His eyes, watching the pistol, took on the sheen of polished stone.
“In case of snakes,” Coppard said, grinning faintly.
“Esteemed sir, this be a holy place most wonderful. Is no cobra here, sir.”
“We shall see,” Coppard said.
We paced forward, marking the forks by dragging a boot across the packed dust. The air smelled long dead, cool and sour, thick as if breathed for so many ages that it had lost all virtue.
At intervals on either side of the corridor opened chambers of varying size. Into each, I jabbed my light. Shadows bounded along the walls. Each chamber contained only shadows, as if the structure had been abandoned on completion.
Further down the corridor appeared the first traces of human use. Near one entrance, fragments of a stone bench lay bro
ken, as if thrown from a height. In another chamber, foul-smelling mounds, for all the world like water-blackened burlap sacks, heaped against the far wall, fetid in the darkness. The floor, itself, gleamed greasily under the flashlights. Low on the far wall, black algae coated the limestone, marking the slow penetration of water. It was the only moisture we had seen in the ruin.
“At last,” U Saya Gyi said, “we come to the glorious presence of Haniman, The Wonderful Maker.”
A final chamber angled off at the end of the passage. By the entrance brown-and-white fungus bulged from the stone. Coppard’s eyes flickered around, examining the wall and ceiling, studying the expression on U Saya Gyi’s face, which darkly reflected trouble and concern.
Darkness crawled against my back. The flashlight’s bright bar showed nothing—a dusty passage marred by our footprints. I whipped the beam back and forth. Shadows flowed and reared. I felt their movement in my veins, a high, unsteady darting, as if my blood shouted alarm.
“Go ahead,” Coppard said to the brown man.
U Saya Gyi bent his head submissively. With precise steps, he entered the chamber of Haniman. Deep ridges netted his downcast face.
I saw Coppard step carefully forward, shoulders bent, narrow face intent. Then his flashlight beam jerked once, precisely as if some solid force had thrust it up. U Saya Gyi darted to the side, whimpering softly.
I stared past Coppard’s shoulder, feeling the driving of my heart. I am not certain what I expected to see. Thieves, perhaps, gripping knives. The sudden rustle of snakes twisting toward us across the hard-packed floor.
We were spared such melodrama.
Close to the carved wall of the chamber stood a stone table. Against the table hulked blackness, a mass larger than a man but of no clear shape, thick and wide, without definition, as if a shadow had been crumpled and flung there.
From the doorway to the crouched blackness extended a slender line of footprints.
