Universe 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  However, we have found no others. The hope of doing so has not quite gone, but it is faint. Yours is a huge world. Only men stultified by impatience or indifference believe it to be small. Only the pitiably ignorant believe it has been explored.

  I’ll tell you more of that first awareness. I came to it as mind without speech or knowledge or memory, in possession of an airy body that could fly without learning the art, see and hear keenly, discover the racing pleasures of the wind. With smell, hunger woke (nothing like a hawk’s) and I pecked at leaves, drawn by this or that pungent scent, until I learned how hunger could be quieted. But though my mind was empty and waiting, it was charged by a flame of curiosity like that of no other animal, I now understand, except man. With no language, tradition or guide, no concept of communication, I watched the continuous wonderful flow of life about me, and I was able to make comparisons, elementary deductions; to move from small observations to large, combine them, and forget nothing. I don’t know how long I lived in this beginning way. Only a few years, I think. I was teaching my mind to do what my body could do without teaching: to fly.

  Though I saw the roundness of the world and the invitation of distances, I did not, during this time, fly beyond the Pyrenees, nor very far out over the oceans. Short distances above northern Africa, yes-how green it was then!-but I always returned. I think I knew I would move on, but first I needed to understand more of this region where my conscious existence began.

  I witnessed. endless killing of life by life. It made me timid, showing me an image of death as motion-all-gone, followed usually by engulfment in some hungry mouth, or decay. I found that most creatures of my own size or smaller’ sheered away from me, the hawks as scared as any of the others. My scent, I suppose, or else something they feel by perceptions that have eluded your studies so far, Doctor. Does my scent offend you?

  No. Musky and strange. But to me, pleasant.

  Good. Mosquitoes were bothering you a while ago. You won’t notice any while I stay here.

  One day-I was still very young, if that is the right word-I was flying above those northern hills, and I saw Lykos crossing a ridge where the snow was lying thinly. Beside him walked Hanuman. This I knew to be altogether out of the pattern. Wolves I had watched, fierce predators; monkeys were animals of the warm southern part, never in these hills and certainly never in the company of a great black wolf. As I slid by and returned in wonder, Lykos’ golden eyes were moving to follow my flight, and with a loving arm over his back crouched Hanuman. Then the monkey stood up, swinging an arm out and in as I had seen human beings do to summon others. I swooped lower still, overcoming fright. No wolf or monkey smell, but my own!--the leaf-mold smell that I encountered when I cleaned my feathers or slipped my head under my wing. I lit beside them unafraid, and little Ophis slid down from her easy riding place in the deep fur of Lykos’ neck. We were four.

  The three were already well advanced in a private language that we still speak among ourselves. We acquired human languages later on, as we needed them. (The story of their growth from what they were three thousand years ago is one of the treasures already saved for you in that record of Hanuman’s.) I picked up this one of ours in a few days, having already learned love at the moment when Hanuman touched me.

  We have no sex. The bodies of Lykos and Hanuman are in the male design but without sexual desire, which we can understand only as observers; Ophis was in the female pattern. A matter of chance: we suppose the drifting dust entered whatever nearby host would admit it. I don’t know which sex my body was before it was changed, and it’s no matter. If we reproduce by spores, possibly (I am now only dreaming aloud)-possibly if we can die of old age, our bodies may dry and scatter the germs of our substance on the air? Does the thought frighten you?

  No, Peregrine.

  We know love in terms of devotion, or shared experience and compassion (in this sense we can love your breed, and we do) and of pleasure in nearness, of the sometimes wordless touching of self by self. Our bodies to you would seem cold; we are warm to one another .... Can you imagine a human being standing in the room where my body was becoming a living dust?

  I can imagine it without distress.

  Can you image yourself standing there?

  That is harder.

  I myself would not wish it. Human beings should live. I think my natural time of dying is still far off. When it comes, perhaps some human invalid, someone who would otherwise die-but it hardly matters. If our substance entered, only the frame, the outward image, would remain human. Human beings must live as human beings.

  It is your world. You cannot be as we are, nor we as varied and adaptable and adventurous, beautiful, even happy, as your people might become if you will learn how to live; if you will start thinking of fewer and better, not of more and greedier. I think we ought to live too, a few of us, if it is possible, if we are certain our substance can be kept harmless to the natural life of Earth. But as we do not have your potential for evil, neither have we, to the full, your potential for good. It is you who must become the Earth people if you can-the good husbandmen, the music makers and keepers of the vineyard.

  Our great journeys began soon after that meeting on the mountainside. We crossed the Pyrenees, in the spring of a year in what you call the ninth century B.C. We traveled as we pleased through the forests that were later Gaul, along the northern coast of Europe, the shores of the Baltic, into the vast body of Asia. Years, and we reached the Pacific. I flew far up and down the coasts, seeing the roofs, smoke, fields of a civilization already stupendous. At that time we did not pause to learn much of it, because we wanted to know the world as a single vision. I found that region of fog where the greatest of oceans narrows to a strait dividing the continents, and I led my friends the long way there. Hanuman, with the aid of Lykos, contrived a raft. We waited till winter narrowed the strait to fewer miles, and crossed, aided as well as threatened by the fierce current and the pack ice. Part of the time Lykos swam, pulling the raft.

  He was in no danger of sinking. We can endure a degree of cold that would be lethal to you, and our flesh is much more light and buoyant than yours. But we do fear the ocean, having had no way to learn enough about it. That day it seemed all menace and obscurity. I hoped as I flew that I could warn them of an ugly fin approaching, or shape rising out of the gray confusion-but that fog, that everlasting fog! Concealing us helpfully, yes, but making my sharp eyes useless. Well, we came through, and later returned safely. As a company we made that journey only one more time. To me, of course, ocean barriers are less than the divisions of a chessboard.

  On that journey-already into the eighth century B.C. in your terms-we explored the entire coast of North America, across the north to Newfoundland, south to what you have made the Canal Zone, down to the Horn with many years of learning a new jungle, northward over the Andes, again Alaska. Decades later, back near our place of origin.

  We studied most of the human settlements and cultures that we found, avoiding contact because we knew the dangers. In those centuries of our exploration we never appeared as more than a quick shadow at the corner of a human eye, a dot of wings circling in and out of the clouds.

  Remember, Doctor: three thousand years is no great age. Before our minds awoke, Mohenjo-Daro had been buried and forgotten under a welter of later building. Great Agade of Babylonia was founded more than a thousand years before our waking-but we knew that city, in our time. Ophis in its cellars, Hanuman a fleeting shadow on midnight roofs. Lykos strolled its stinking alleys in the dark, listening to human voices, and the dogs cringed away unharmed.

  Greece we knew, her few enlightened centuries. I have flown over Crete, over all the Grecian islands. We can say to you, Helen was indeed beautiful; the heart of Achilles did break at the death of his friend. I saw the burning of Troy town black on the sky only one of the thousand wars we witnessed, all of them foul, vain and unnecessary. That one matters only because a poet made music. Yes, Odysseus of the many devices did set ou
t from there on his homeward journey-but of that I know, as you do, only what is told by a better voice.

  In a much later journey we passed by Antioch and Tyre, then on as far as a massive human disturbance-Alexandria, where we heard familiar Greek and Roman dialects. We followed the coast westward and came upon the legions before Carthage. By your calendar, that was 146 B.C.

  That night Lykos and Hanuman prowled outside the camps and heard the cursing, complaining, occasionally thoughtful talk of soldiers, chatter of camp-followers and slaves, grunt of dice-players, squeak of wheels, spitting, snorting, belching, whine of whips -night sounds not greatly different from what we heard again in 1346 at the siege of Calais. Not deeply different, old man, from night as we heard it in the summer of 1863 outside Vicksburg. If we had been present I think we would have heard the same blending of black mirth, innocent obscenities, patience, aimless despair and fatigue, in the trenches of Verdun, or before the fighting began at Monte Cassino. We would hear it, possibly more hysterical, wherever soldiers talk to each other in the poisonous war your government carries on so blindly and endlessly in Vietnam.

  We try to understand it.

  I flew above Carthage. We had grown rather sophisticated then about the human thing. I knew what would happen. We guessed the dominance of Rome was inevitable, if only because of that beefy Roman stubbornness, and this city was the enemy’s heart. We had heard gossip and truth about bilious Cato in his eighties. The old hater was dead then-he hated the Greeks too-but his hate still sputtered where the legions could hear it. In six days Carthage was smoke. Before I sought cleaner air I heard the screaming, glimpsed the usual human entertainments. Yet it was said there was not much laughter among the Roman officers-and yes, if you’re curious, it’s probably true that Scipio Aemilianus did weep, for the record, at this product of his good generalship.

  Sickened of men, above all sickened of their self-delusions, we wandered down into jungle Africa-our third long journey there -and watched again your groping human pattern in the life of savage tribes. Those were rough jungles, as some of them are today. Once Lykos ‘(he is coming to you now from the pines) fell into a pygmies’ pit trap and we could not finish digging him out before they came. I darted among them and tore at their faces until they fled, gibbering of witchcraft.

  I can’t recall you ever looked handsomer, Peregrine.

  Let me tend that leg, Lykos!

  I can walk on three, Doctor. Our wounds heal; our green blooded flesh has never taken any infection. But it’s true we heal much more slowly than when we were young, the bullet does give me pain, and there at the joint I suppose it might interfere with the setting of the bone. However, sir-contact with our flesh-

  Oh, you don’t believe that yourself, do you? After all your time on Earth, and no harm done? Let me at least extract the bullet, and splint it. It would be simple, for me.

  But about contact-some caution, Doctor

  After three thousand years and no harm done? Let me follow my own common sense. Besides, I’m--quite old. It makes no real difference. Rest here. I’ll get what I need ....

  He wouldn’t call others with a telephone?

  No, Lykos. I am sure. He’s honest.

  You have not made the request?

  No, but I told him we came to make one.

  Still time to retreat, Peregrine. We could let him think this surgery was what we came to ask.

  Too timid, Lykos. We must make the request.

  Something in his face-I think he has a cancer.

  It’s possible . . . Quiet. Do whatever he asks ....

  Was that too much?

  No, you’re very quick and good. But Doctor, I do suggest avoiding contact with the green blood that’s oozing where the bullet was. Let it drain. It clots quickly. Try not to touch it when you put on the splints.

  This thing is a nasty little.22. What happened?

  Some hunter. I was certain I was hidden but must have been careless. I ran off. I don’t know what he thinks I was.

  If he thinks. Splints now. This will be bad, you know ....

  I’ve felt worse .... )Vow it will heal. Your kindness is spring in winter. Peregrine, go on with what you were telling him. Mm, those pygmies! I did get rather cross.

  Yes, you expressed your thoughts with some freedom. Well, Doctor, it was after we had witnessed the decay and near-death of learning in what you call the early Middle Ages that Hanuman began work on his record. That dreary collapse, from the fourth century on, that blackout of Western culture for something like a thousand years, made clear to us how easy it is for a society as imperfectly developed, as precariously balanced in nature as yours, to let its light go out. Maybe there is a recurrent mental fatigue in human cultures, induced by the short periods of enterprise. You push on with your grand vigor for a while, and then slump; abdication of intelligence as the governing force, and of course if that’s complete enough it drags down virtually everything in a long ruin.

  It seemed to us that in our limited way we might function as preservers of history. We thought that a detailed, scrupulously truthful record of all we knew, all we had observed from our detachment, might someday be a thing of value to you, even a source of guidance. Surely it’s true, if a culture that forgets history is condemned to repeat it, the complement of the proposition ought to be true.

  Qualify it, Peregrine-I imagine the Doctor will agree. No culture as yet has actually forgotten history because no culture has really possessed more than fragments of it. With that allowed for I guess the old saying may be true enough. I suppose a knowledge of history adequate for a trustworthy guide has never been possessed by more than a handful of scholars. Some have done their best to transmit it, but who reads? Men at large simply don’t know their own past. Snippets hastily gulped in school-by those who have schools; simple and popular generalizations, mostly false and harmful.

  I am forced to agree, Lykos.

  Lykos is more a pessimist than I, maybe for the very reason that his affection for humanity is deeper.

  Maybe. Never think I doubt the value of our record. I only wonder whether these volatile short-lived beings will ever find the wit to use it.

  He and I speak alike, Doctor; think very much alike. But Lykos thinks in privacy, like all sentient beings. You might have to know us a hundred, years or so to discover in how many ways we are persons. Ophis was our humorist. Had a sweet small thorn in her speech that could make even Hanuman smile. He’s all meditative thought, logic, philosophy-and compassion. His hands have changed visibly with that endless writing; both somewhat enlarged-he writes with either hand and deep black grooves in thumbs and middle fingers.

  We began our record in your ninth century A.D. We had hoped to give it to you in a time when you had begun to show, as a society of intelligent beings, more signs of intelligent behavior. Under present conditions we can hardly wait any longer for that. We may have waited too long already, counted too much on the power of your often brilliant individuals and minorities. The record is not finished. Hanuman has been able to bring it only a short way into your twentieth century .... Lykos, my throat is tired.

  I’ll go on, in my grumbling way. Are you sure, Doctor, that we’re safe from interruption? I’m not prepared to meet anyone but you.

  The kids all took o-f to a movie in the village and won’t be back till after dark-you’ll hear the two cars. No one else comes to see me here, or if anyone does, that door has a loose latch 1 didn’t shut You could push it open and then get into a closet or under my bed.

  I’m housebroken, too. (Peregrine, I don’t feel that shrinking, when he strokes my head.)

  (Good. You were always a sentimental pup.)

  That was your private language, wasn’t it?

  Yes, I was telling old Feather puff I like your touch. We conceived the idea of that record suddenly, but it took years to find a place to work on it and keep it safe. At length we chose a cave in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps. The entrance was larger than we liked; we did what
we could with brush barricades. It seemed remote enough. Swarming Italy lay more than a hundred miles away across the Adriatic. Around our cave, gaunt wilderness, here and there goat trails, six miles away a mountain track that was used, but very little, by carts and horsemen. From our cliff we looked down on the distant roofs of a peasant village, but we were sheltered from it not only by our height, but by ugly gorges, dense woods, tumbled rocks. Bears, the beasts in my shape, and that was also a country thick with belief in vampires, witches, all manner of spooks. No man ventured far alone, even by day, and two or more men together are sure to make a noise. Our secret trail was easy for Hanuman. I had enough trouble with parts of the climb so that I was sure no other wolf would try it, and men would be deterred unless they had some compelling motive. Ophis knew many little approaches but preferred to ride my neck-that trifling weight ....