Other Worlds

by Jon Scieszka

  His father’s eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.

  “I cannot rise,” he whispered faintly. “I cannot.”

  “Dark!” The mother croaked, the girl came running. “Here,” and Sim was handed to the girl. “Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.” She gave Sim one last fondling touch.

  Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.

  “Go now,” said the mother. “Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.”

  Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp, looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence:

  “Why . . . ?”

  He saw his mother stiffen. “The child spoke!”

  “Aye,” said his father. “Did you hear what he said?”

  “I heard,” said the mother quietly.

  The last thing Sim saw of his living parents was his mother weakly, swayingly, slowly moving across the floor to lie beside her silent husband. That was the last time he ever saw them move.

  IV

  The night came and passed and then started the second day.

  The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long, the bodies numerous.

  Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.

  At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed. Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason? Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get to it and fly away into space?

  The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.

  The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet air.

  Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third. They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.

  Another piece of his life opened wide.

  Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant black, low lines of small rock cliffs.

  “War!”

  The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.

  But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting, killing?

  From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his stomach cold. “Why, Dark, why?”

  Dark didn’t know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flicking its pink tongue, forever hungry.

  Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetlelike boy scuttled up the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.

  The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.

  Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, “This should not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!”

  Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. “Get on!” she cried. “What’s your name, bad one?”

  “Chion!” laughed the boy. “Chion, Chion, Chion!”

  Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he’d waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene—mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulant Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!

  Chion darted off, turned at a distance, taunting:

  “Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!”

  And he vanished around a rock.

  More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible, quick lifetime? There was no time to make either, was there?

  Dark, knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for food, she whispered fiercely in his ear. “Enemies are made over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends. Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you’ve made an enemy for life. Life’s so short enemies must be made quickly.” And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing older before her rightful time. “You must fight to protect yourself. Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You see? As long as that is believed, you’re in danger.”

  But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would become shapely and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet-blue flame.

  She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he’d found a friend, a love, a wife, one who would a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.

  Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.

  “Your name?” he shouted after her.

  “Lyte!” she called laughingly back.

  “I’m Sim,” he answered, confused and bewildered.

  “Sim!” she repeated it, flashing on. “I’ll remember!”

  Dark nudged his ribs. “Here, eat,” she said to the distracted boy. “Eat or you’ll never get big enough to catch her.”

  From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. “Lyte!” he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. “Lyte! I’ll remember Lyte, too!”

  Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. “I see your life before you, little Sim. You’ll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry—the sun’s coming!”

  They ran back to the caves.

  V

  One-fourth of his life was over! Babyhood was gone. He was now a young boy! Wild rains lashed the valley at nightfall. He watched new river channels cut in the valley, out past the mountain of the metal seed. He stored the knowledge for later use. Each night there was a new river, a bed newly cut.

  “What’s beyond the valley?” wondered Sim.

  “No one’s ever been beyond it,” explained Dark. “All who tried to reach the plain were frozen to death or burnt. The only land we know’s within half an hour’s run. Half an hour out and half an hour back.”

  “No one has ever reached the metal seed, then?”

  Dark scoffed. “The Scientists, they try. Silly fools. They don’t know enough to stop. It’s no use. It’s too far.”

  The Scientists. The word stirred him. He had almost forgotten the vision he had in the moments before and after birth. His voice was eager. “Where are the Scientists?”

  Dark looked away from him, “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. They’d kill you, experimenting! I don’t want you joining them! Live your life, don’t cut it in half trying to reach that silly metal thing on the mountain.”

  “I’ll find out where they are from someone else, then!”

  “No one’ll tell you! They hate the Scientists. You’ll have to find them on your own. And then what? Will you save us? Yes, save us, little boy!” Her face was sullen; already half her life was gone.

  “We can’t just sit and talk and eat,�
�� he protested. “And nothing else.” He leapt up.

  “Go find them!” she retorted acidly. “They’ll help you forget. Yes, yes,” she spat it out. “Forget your life’s over in just a few more days!”

  Sim ran through the tunnels, seeking. Sometimes he half imagined where the Scientists were. But then a flood of angry thought from those around him, when he asked the direction to the Scientists’ cave, washed over him in confusion and resentment. After all, it was the Scientists’ fault that they had been placed upon this terrible world! Sim flinched under the bombardment of oaths and curses.

  Quietly he took his seat in a central chamber with the children to listen to the grown men talk. This was the time of education, the Time of Talking. No matter how he chafed at delay, or how great his impatience, even though life slipped fast from him and death approached like a black meteor, he knew his mind needed knowledge. Tonight, then, was the night of school. But he sat uneasily. Only five more days of life.

  Chion sat across from Sim, his thin-mouthed face arrogant.

  Lyte appeared between the two. The last few hours had made her firmer footed, gentler, taller. Her hair shone brighter. She smiled as she sat beside Sim, ignoring Chion. And Chion became rigid at this and ceased eating.

  The dialogue crackled, filled the room. Swift as heartbeats, one thousand, two thousand words a minute. Sim learned, his head filled. He did not shut his eyes, but lapsed into a kind of dreaming that was almost intra-embryonic in lassitude and drowsy vividness. In the faint background the words were spoken, and they wove a tapestry of knowledge in his head.

  He dreamed of green meadows free of stones, all grass, round and rolling and rushing easily toward a dawn with no taint of freezing, merciless cold or smell of boiled rock or scorched monument. He walked across the green meadow. Overhead the metal seeds flew by in a heaven that was a steady, even temperature. Things were slow, slow, slow.

  Birds lingered upon gigantic trees that took a hundred, two hundred, five thousand days to grow. Everything remained in its place, the birds did not flicker nervously at a hint of sun, nor did the trees suck back frightenedly when a ray of sunlight poured over them.

  In this dream people strolled, they rarely ran, the heart rhythm of them was evenly languid, not jerking and insane. The grass remained, and did not burn away in torches. The dream people talked always of tomorrow and living and not tomorrow and dying. It all seemed so familiar that when Sim felt someone take his hand he thought it simply another part of the dream.

  Lyte’s hand lay inside his own. “Dreaming?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Things are balanced. Our minds, to even things, to balance the unfairness of our living, go back in on ourselves, to find what there is that is good to see.”

  He beat his hand against the stone floor again and again. “It does not make things fair! I hate it! It reminds me that there is something better, something I have missed! Why can’t we be ignorant? Why can’t we live and die without knowing that this is an abnormal living?” And his breath rushed harshly from his half-open, constricted mouth.

  “There is purpose in everything,” said Lyte. “This gives us purpose, makes us work, plan, try to find a way.”

  His eyes were hot emeralds in his face. “I walked up a hill of grass, very slowly,” he said.

  “The same hill of grass I walked an hour ago?” asked Lyte.

  “Perhaps. Close enough to it. The dream is better than the reality.” He flexed his eyes, narrowed them. “I watched people and they did not eat.”

  “Or talk?”

  “Or talk, either. And we always are eating, always talking. Sometimes those people in the dream sprawled with their eyes shut, not moving a muscle.”

  As Lyte stared down into his face a terrible thing happened. He imagined her face blackening, wrinkling, twisting into knots of agedness. The hair blew out like snow about her ears, the eyes were like discolored coins caught in a web of lashes. Her teeth sank away from her lips, the delicate fingers hung like charred twigs from her atrophied wrists. Her beauty was consumed and wasted even as he watched, and when he seized her, in terror, he cried out, for he imagined his own hand corroded, and he choked back a cry.

  “Sim, what’s wrong?”

  The saliva in his mouth dried at the taste of the words.

  “Five more days . . .”

  “The Scientists.”

  Sim started. Who’d spoken? In the dim light a tall man talked. “The Scientists crashed us on this world, and now have wasted thousands of lives and time. It’s no use. It’s no use. Tolerate them but give them none of your time. You only live once, remember.”

  Where were these hated Scientists? Now, after the Learning, the Time of Talking, he was ready to find them. Now, at least, he knew enough to begin his fight for freedom, for the ship!

  “Sim, where’re you going?”

  But Sim was gone. The echo of his running feet died away down a shaft of polished stone.

  It seemed that half the night was wasted. He blundered into a dozen dead ends. Many times he was attacked by the insane young men who wanted his life energy. Their superstitious ravings echoed after him. The gashes of their hungry fingernails covered his body.

  He found what he looked for.

  A half dozen men gathered in a small basalt cave deep down in the cliff lode. On a table before them lay objects which, though unfamiliar, struck harmonious chords in Sim.

  The Scientists worked in sets, old men doing important work, young men learning, asking questions; and at their feet were three small children. They were a process. Every eight days there was an entirely new set of scientists working on any one problem. The amount of work done was terribly inadequate. They grew old, fell dead just when they were beginning their creative period. The creative time of any one individual was perhaps a matter of twelve hours out of his entire span. Three quarters of one’s life was spent learning, a brief interval of creative power, then senility, insanity, death.

  The men turned as Sim entered.

  “Don’t tell me we have a recruit?” said the eldest of them.

  “I don’t believe it,” said another, younger one. “Chase him away. He’s probably one of those warmongers.”

  “No, no,” objected the elder one, moving with little shuffles of his bare feet toward Sim. “Come in, come in, boy.” He had friendly eyes, slow eyes, unlike those of the swift inhabitants of the upper caves. Gray and quiet. “What do you want?”

  Sim hesitated, lowered his head, unable to meet the quiet, gentle gaze. “I want to live,” he whispered.

  The old man laughed quietly. He touched Sim’s shoulder. “Are you a new breed? Are you sick?” he queried of Sim, half seriously. “Why aren’t you playing? Why aren’t you readying yourself for the time of love and marriage and children? Don’t you know that tomorrow night you’ll be almost grown? Don’t you realize that if you are not careful you’ll miss all of life?” He stopped.

  Sim moved his eyes back and forth with each query. He blinked at the instruments on the table top. “Shouldn’t I be here?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” roared the old man, sternly. “But it’s a miracle you are. We’ve had no volunteers from the rank and file for a thousand days! We’ve had to breed our own scientists, a closed unit! Count us! Six! Six men! And three children! Are we not overwhelming?” The old man spat upon the stone floor. “We ask for volunteers and the people shout back at us, ‘Get someone else!’ or ‘We have no time!’ And you know why they say that?”

  “No.” Sim flinched.

  “Because they’re selfish. They’d like to live longer, yes, but they know that anything they do cannot possibly insure their own lives any extra time. It might guarantee longer life to some future offspring of theirs. But they won’t give up their love, their brief youth, give up one interval of sunset or sunrise!”

  Sim leaned against the table, earnestly. “I understand.”

  “You do?” The old man stared at him blindly. He sighed a
nd slapped the child’s arm gently. “Yes, of course, you do. It’s too much to expect anyone to understand, anymore. You’re rare.”

  The others moved in around Sim and the old man.

  “I am Dienc. Tomorrow night Cort here will be in my place. I’ll be dead by then. And the night after that someone else will be in Cort’s place, and then you, if you work and believe—but first, I give you a chance. Return to your playmates if you want. There is someone you love? Return to her. Life is short. Why should you care for the unborn to come? You have a right to youth. Go now, if you want. Because if you stay you’ll have no time for anything but working and growing old and dying at your work. But it is good work. Well?”

  Sim looked at the tunnel. From a distance the wind roared and blew, the smells of cooking and the patter of naked feet sounded, and the laughter of young people was an increasingly good thing to hear. He shook his head, impatiently, and his eyes were wet.

  “I will stay,” he said.

  VI

  The third night and third day passed. It was the fourth night. Sim was drawn into their living. He learned about that metal seed upon the top of the far mountain. He heard of the original seeds—things called “ships” that crashed and how the survivors hid and dug in the cliffs, grew old swiftly and in their scrabbling to barely survive, forgot all science. Knowledge of mechanical things had no chance of survival in such a volcanic civilization. There was only NOW for each human.

  Yesterday didn’t matter, tomorrow stared them vividly in their very faces. But somehow the radiations that had forced their aging had also induced a kind of telepathic communication whereby philosophies and impressions were absorbed by the newborn. Racial memory, growing instinctively, preserved memories of another time.

  “Why don’t we go to that ship on the mountain?” asked Sim.

  “It is too far. We would need protection from the sun,” explained Dienc.

  “Have you tried to make protection?”

  “Salves and ointments, suits of stone and bird-wing and, recently, crude metals. None of which worked. In ten thousand more lifetimes perhaps we’ll have made a metal in which will flow cool water to protect us on the march to the ship. But we work so slowly, so blindly. This morning, mature, I took up my instruments. Tomorrow, dying, I lay them down. What can one man do in one day? If we had ten thousand men, the problem would be solved. . . .”