by Rich Handley
But Taylor and Nova, and now Adam, remained in their Tree Home. He still pulled the rope ladder up every evening.
Nova had never learned to make more than a few guttural utterances, and early on Taylor decided that language in humans must be learned early or else the place for it in the brain simply withered away. He’d ached to hear another human talk before Adam’s first words.
For the first year, as others arrived, singly or in pairs and even small groups, he’d wave and say “Hello,” but the greeting was never returned. After a while, before Adam, he gave up on the hello and stopped talking. He mimicked the pointing and guttural sounds of his new neighbors. They built more huts and added more fields and extended the Wall.
One night, when Adam was eighteen months old, the humans, now a tribe, were sitting around the fire as they always did early in the evening. Taylor would never remember what prompted it, perhaps his days in the Boy Scouts, perhaps the utter loneliness of not hearing words.
It was spring—he would remember that later—and that evening, he leaned forward and said, “Once upon a time.”
It became known as the First Night of the Fire Story. From then on, every evening, Taylor would tell the stories he could remember. He rued the English classes he’d skipped to indulge in his hobby of making model rockets, because the one thing he truly knew how to build was the one thing they didn’t need.
Running out of fairy tales, he switched to history and told these people, his people, of their origins. And the history of those who came long before them. He never knew how much they understood, but they never seemed to get bored. Their eyes were always on him, their attention rapt. So, like any good storyteller, Taylor took that as interest.
* * *
The night Adam was born, Taylor had been grateful for the other women. It was a long night and a hard birth. He spent the dark hours pacing back and forth by the river, trying to ignore the animal-like sounds of her pain. But just before dawn, she delivered a big, healthy boy and Taylor longed for cigars to pass around.
The other men had watched him with the questioning looks of men not used to seeing another man worry about woman matters. For them, a baby would come and it would live or it would die, and maybe the mother would die, but the art of worrying had been lost to them over centuries of struggling to simply survive. An integral part of their apathy.
A curious thing occurred several months later, when another woman went into labor. Taylor saw the father pacing by the river in the same spot. He realized a ritual had been created, and while the emotions weren’t perfectly attached, it had to start somewhere. After several days, he noticed that no one fished there and the women didn’t wash there anymore, and with each new baby, the pacing was repeated.
There was soon a strip of hard-packed dirt next to the river.
After Adam uttered “da-da,” Fort Wayne was large enough and the crops bountiful enough for Taylor to devote his time to teaching his son and the other children who came into the world afterward to speak. At night, he continued telling stories around the fire. As the children grew older, they were the ones in the front row, listening intently, with an attention their parents could never have.
Those who could speak began calling themselves Youngers. They called their parents People.
* * *
The years passed.
Taylor and Nova had two more boys and a girl. Fort Wayne spread out along the river. The Wall still surrounded what the Youngers were calling Old Town, but the human presence was so large now that the predators kept their distance.
One year, a hunting party came back with a mountain lion they’d killed. The predators were now the prey.
After six years, no other humans came from out of the Forbidden Zone.
Taylor didn’t waste time speculating what that meant. Their world was here. Now.
As far as the apes? He didn’t foresee them ever having the pressing need to attempt the Forbidden Zone. But the part of him that had become an ace in World War II and Korea wasn’t naïve. He set up a Watch at the edge of the desert, rotating two-man teams there, as soon as they were able to spare the manpower.
Just in case.
Life went on.
Sometimes, the men came back from a hunt with enough kills for days of feasting. Taylor began to hear laughter, and that was when he realized he hadn’t heard it during the first years. Some years there were terrible things, such as the Day of Drowning, when three children were swept down-river.
Taylor realized there were other skills besides language that had been lost. He began swimming lessons for the Youngers, and some of the People even joined in.
* * *
After many years, Nova grew ill. Taylor stopped teaching the Youngers and telling Fire Stories. He spent all his time nursing her. He only came down the rope ladder to get food and water.
There were still gatherings around the fire, but no Fire Story, so it became known as just the Fire Circle. One evening, as Taylor wrung out a sweat-soaked cloth in the door of his Tree Home, he saw the humans, Younger and People, gather round the fire, holding hands in a circle. There was no conversation among the Youngers, as if talking would violate the sanctity of the circle. But Taylor’s focus was on Nova as she grew weaker and weaker.
He suspected cancer, but what did it matter? What did that word even mean here?
There were no doctors, no hospitals, no treatment. She was dying as she’d lived: with mute acceptance. She’d smile at him whenever she opened her eyes, and that was message enough.
The morning she didn’t smile, he knew the end was close.
And one morning, she didn’t open her eyes and her breathing grew shallower. Nova died later that day in his arms. Taylor cried out, not with words, but with pure agony from a place deep inside. He cried out not like a man who had once been a war hero, an astronaut, the founder of Fort Wayne, but like one of the People. Distantly, he heard the cry echoed by dozens of throats, People and Younger, but he didn’t focus on it, lost in his grief.
After several hours, just before dark, he carried her down the rope ladder, easily supporting her gaunt frame with one arm. When he reached the ground, weeping, and turned, he saw that Adam, now a strapping teenager of sixteen, was in the Pacing Place, along with his younger brothers. Even his little sister, Star, was there—the first time Taylor had ever seen a woman pace.
It would not be the last.
The rest of Fort Wayne was gathered between Taylor’s hut and the Pacing Place. None of the Youngers were speaking. Tears began to flow, from those who saw him holding Nova and his own tears, spreading out, through the crowd as everyone became aware.
In the Pacing Place, Adam dropped to his knees and cried out, “Mother!”
His brothers and Star knelt next to him, weeping, and crying out for their mother.
The other Youngers took up the cry, repeating, “Mother!”
The People wailed in shared anguish.
Taylor, in this moment of deep sorrow, felt a surge of compassion for his fellow man. He was not the same embittered man who’d volunteered for the ANSA mission in order to leave mankind behind in both space and time. Tragedy, as it tends to do, had brought everyone together to experience the same feeling.
Nova’s death was the day empathy returned to humans.
From then on, the Pacing Place was used to mark both birth and death.
* * *
There came a day when Taylor paced with Adam, whose wife had gone into labor. And for once, there wasn’t silence in the Pacing Place. Taylor spoke with his son, telling him how proud he was. And reassuring him, just like any supportive father would bolster a worried son. It was the first time words were exchanged in the Pacing Place, but not the last. The birth was not difficult and the midwife came out, carrying the squalling baby, and handed it to Adam.
“A son,” Adam said to Taylor. Then he held the baby up and everyone who gathered nearby knelt.
“What are they doing?” Taylor asked.
&n
bsp; “They give thanks,” Adam said. “As in the long story. Thanks that the baby is healthy. Thanks that there will be another man to lead us. Thanks that there will be a strong man like his grandfather.”
“And his father,” Taylor said, unable to look out at the people, his lips trembling, his eyes damp.
Adam handed the baby back to the midwife, started to follow her to the hut, but then stopped and came back to his father. “We had decided on a name if it was a boy. But only if we have your permission.”
Taylor was confused. “Why would you need my permission?”
“We want to name him after you.”
“Taylor? That’s not a—”
“We want to name him George. With your permission.”
Taylor was surprised. He’d only told Nova.
“How did you know?” Taylor asked.
Adam reached into a pocket and pulled out the dog tags which Taylor had given Nova so many years ago. She’d never shown them to him again and he’d forgotten. Adam handed them to his father.
“When did she give them to you?” Taylor asked.
“She showed them to me one day,” Adam said. “When she knew I could read. She kept pointing at the letters. So I told her what they said, although I didn’t understand anything more than your name.”
Taylor’s fingers were tracing the letters stamped into the metal.
TAYLOR, GEORGE
325229325 ANSA
O NEG
ATHEIST
Taylor recoiled at the last line, having forgotten so much about who he’d been before coming to this planet. Why he’d left his Earth in the first place.
“I knew the first line was your name,” Adam said. “But the rest? What are the numbers?”
“A way of being identified,” Taylor said.
“You needed more than just your name?”
“There were many, many people then,” Taylor said, but Adam had a point. When did people become numbers? At what point in history? When in evolution—or rather, devolution—had that occurred?
“And the third line?” Adam asked.
“My blood type.”
“What is ‘blood type?’” Adam was confused. “Blood is red. All blood is the same.”
Taylor smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Not yet. We’ve got a ways to go before we get concerned with that.”
“And the last line?”
“A word that represents my foolishness and my ego,” Taylor said. “When I thought I knew everything.”
“But you do know everything,” Adam said.
“No,” Taylor said. “Every day, I learn how much I don’t know.” He clapped his son on the shoulder. “Now, go join your wife. And your son. George, son of Adam.”
“Grandson of Taylor!” Adam cried out, smiling. He ran to the hut.
* * *
Many nights later at Fire Story, Taylor began to tell of a man named Caesar, who led a mighty army. How he crossed a river he was not supposed to cross.
“Like the Ape Army crossing into the Forbidden Zone? Why we Watch?” one of the oldest Youngers asked.
“No,” Taylor said, appalled at the thought. “Like all the People did. Taking a chance. Rolling the dice crossing the desert into the Forbidden Zone.”
And then he had to explain what rolling the dice meant, and that took the rest of Fire Story that evening. He resumed Caesar’s tale the following evening. Caesar arriving in Rome. Becoming Emperor. Taylor was sure he had some of the facts wrong, but what did that matter?
It was a Fire Story.
* * *
There came a day when one of the Younger couples had a boy and they named him Caesar. For a while, others would raise their hands and cry out “Hail, Caesar” whenever they passed the boy, but that quickly faded away.
* * *
It happened so slowly that Taylor never realized the change, but Fire Story time was more often filled with questions from Youngers and their children than it was with Story.
So the man who’d grown up on Earth before this Earth, who’d built model rockets and caught tadpoles and watched The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on TV, became the man who answered questions. He was aware that a day would come when they would know everything he knew, and more.
It might already have passed, he had to admit as he answered a question about the American Civil War he was sure he’d already answered before. But the Youngers acted as if they were hearing it for the first time, and Taylor learned the lesson of gratitude long after he’d already taught it to his son, Adam.
* * *
The years began to merge, moving faster and faster. One night, lying alone in his Tree Home, thinking about how quickly time was passing by, Taylor remembered the physics of Doctor Hasslein and his theory. The basis on which Liberty 1 had been designed, built, and launched. And how, despite such a long journey, he’d ended up back on this Earth, but not his Earth.
It was their Earth, he realized. The Youngers and those who followed them.
Taylor abruptly sat up, because thinking of the past and time travel made him wonder about the future. Their future.
The next night, at Fire Story, he waved off the questions. They all fell silent, sensing the change. He was seated on a chair Adam had built for him. His firstborn was to his right, sitting on a log, with his son next to him, between him and his wife.
“This Earth was born out of my Earth,” Taylor began. “I ran from my Earth. I have told you of my journey into the stars. Into time. And how I was brought back to this Earth, which was once my Earth.
“You have asked me many questions, but the question no one has asked me is this: Why did I leave my Earth?”
He looked around at all the faces around the fire, rows deep. He remembered when there were so few. When it was just Nova at his side.
“Why did you, Father?” Adam asked, snapping him out of his thoughts, a place he was disappearing into more and more.
“Because my Earth had a sickness,” Taylor said. “The worst kind of sickness. Man, the marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox which sent me to the stars and to travel in time, made war against each other. Allowed the children of other men and women to starve while they had plenty of food of their own.”
“Why?” one of the second generation of Youngers asked, the concept so strange, she could not grasp it.
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “If you’d asked me then, I would have told you, ‘Because it’s our nature.’ But it isn’t our nature, is it?”
Adam answered for everyone. “It is not. Everything we have is everyone’s.”
Taylor held his hand up and quiet reigned. “When I left my Earth, I could look back and see it.” He pointed up. “Earth is blue and white and green and brown. It is beautiful. For the first time in my life, I realized how small I was. How all men were. It crushed my ego for a time.
“And I was lonely. I was lonely until I came to Our Earth and met Nova.”
“Mother,” Adam said, and the word was repeated in a low murmur around the fire.
Taylor paused, groping his way back to the Story he wanted to tell. He remembered. “This Fire Story, I want to speak not of what was. I want to speak of what will be. And of what cannot ever be.”
The Youngers waited. The remaining People—and Taylor realized there were fewer now than he remembered—were silent, their eyes reading his face and the reactions of the Youngers for what their brains could not process.
“What cannot be is My Earth,” Taylor said. “It cannot happen again. This must remain Your Earth.”
“No, Father,” Adam protested. “It is Our Earth. We are all one.”
“We are,” Taylor agreed, seeing Nova in the lines of his face. “But the day will come when there will be so many Youngers, when you all won’t know each other. When some will be strangers. When some will start another town.”
“When we become numbers?” Adam asked.
“You must try never to become numbers to each other,” Taylor said. “You must always keep
your names. And know each other’s names.”
“We would never make war against ourselves,” young Caesar said.
“You would not,” Taylor agreed. “But will your children, when there are other towns? And your children’s children?”
A murmur rippled around the fire.
“When that happens,” Taylor said, “there is the possibility of conflict. Of My Earth coming back.”
“What should we do?” Adam asked.
“There is a need for laws,” Taylor said. “Even the apes learned this lesson. While they treated us, the People, like animals, they treated each other with respect. They had a law. ‘Ape shall never kill ape.’”
The Youngers, none of whom had ever met an ape, tried to understand.
Taylor didn’t need them to understand the apes. “What we must do is have the same law. For humans.”
Before he could go on, Adam stood up. “Human will not kill human. Human will not harm human.” He looked down at his father. “Should this be?”
Taylor’s throat was tight. He could only nod his approval.
* * *
The years continued to pass with more good than bad. Fort Wayne grew until the town was too much for the surrounding fields. As predicted, a group led by Caesar, who wasn’t so young anymore, packed up and left, moving more than ten miles away to found their own town, which they named New Hope.
“As if they didn’t have hope here,” Adam groused to Taylor one afternoon, as they sat near the warm embers of the fire, watching Adam’s son in the Pacing Place, surrounded by his siblings and friends, as he waited for his first child to come into the world.
“Hope is a good thing,” Taylor said. “It got your mother and me to this place when we were crossing the desert.”
“Why did you name this Fort Wayne?” Adam asked.
Taylor barely heard the question, half asleep from the sun and the warmth of the Fire Circle. “Huh? Fort Wayne? Where I grew up. A small town, small for My Earth, in a place called—” He tried to remember the state. “Indiana.” He chuckled. “But it was also a private joke. I knew we would need a wall, a fort. And I thought of a great hero from the movies I used to watch. A cowboy.”
“‘Cowboy?’”
