Come back to the story, Lykos.
Yes. That cave served us five hundred years. Hanuman developed the full plan of his work. No feeling of immediate urgency was pushing us in those centuries, only the larger sense of it, awareness of the insecurity of all things living. We could not be certain the civilization of Europe would recover any force and virtue, but by that time we had our own perspective. We were in touch with the rest of the world, with men’s continual failures, recoveries, groping advances.
Peregrine of course was Hanuman’s best reporter, traveling wherever wings can go. We knew of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, the primitive peoples, the tribal groups and young civilizations in this northern continent. China, the Mongols, India, the shut-away people of Australia, the human experience in jungle, veldt, seacoast of Africa. In our record is more than you can ever learn elsewhere of the wonderful voyages that carried men to the islands of the Pacific. There’s no settled place in the world from the Arctic to Patagonia where Peregrine has not listened in the dark to the talk of men. I myself made many journeys, with Ophis and then alone.
Often Hanuman left his work to come with me, because he was our best thief. In those centuries the monasteries were almost our only source of parchment, vellum, other writing fabrics. Hanuman made ink from gum and soot, and slotted bamboo pens long before Europe had anything better than the quill; papers we had to steal. Robbing the poor monks’ scriptoria was often easier than getting what we needed from cellars or other storage places, and it was always more fun. In the monastic records of eastern Europe from the ninth into the fourteenth century, there may well be here and there an embarrassed mention of the theft of writing materials by the Devil; if so, Devil is to be taken in the Pickwickian sense. Then we’d have the stiff task of conveying our loot by secret ways to the cave. Hanuman was writing at that time in the compact, rather inflexible Latin of the Augustan age, and he wrote with almost no margins in a script hardly thicker than the legs of a millipede; nevertheless our greed for the precious material was insatiable For Hanuman-always the master intelligence of our company, before whom we others are only loving fools-would not leave out one fact that might be of importance to men, and he was bound to have it all in such perfect order that the record could be used by any human scholar with ability to read and courage to endure the truth.
Our plunder had to travel mostly on my back. I had narrow escapes. Sometimes I had sore feet. But it was worth any effort. And that part of it, that product of five hundred years of toil, was all destroyed.
The year was 1348, the month of May. Ophis had died two hundred years before. I was traveling southward through France, where the Hundred Years’ War had already built up the true monument to princely quarrels-ruin and desolation. And as I started down the Rhone valley I began to overhear men talk of that other plague, the Black Death, for it was then, as we knew, in full fury at Avignon. My mind was drenched with the presence of death, when Peregrine found me with the news of our own disaster.
A young man out hunting very bravely alone had taken a fall into a spot from which he could see our cave entrance. Intent at his work, Hanuman had not been aware of him until he tumbled and cursed in pain. Then from behind the brush barricade Hanuman watched him, not too badly hurt, limping and scrambling nearer. He had saved his bow and hunting knife in the fall, but lost his arrows; he was bleeding, lamed, scared, and wanted shelter because the sky was churning with the threat of storm. Hanuman stayed motionless in the barricade until the young man pushed aside part of it and entered the cave. Then he moved to better concealment and called in a human voice: “Go away! Go away!” He had a desperate hope that if the boy could be frightened off there might be a chance to get the record out of danger before others were brought to look at the place.
The young hunter was properly frightened, and plunged out of the cave with Hanuman’s pen and the strip of parchment he had been busied with and he searched for the source of the call. Then his keen eyes found Hanuman’s face as the gusty wind shoved bushes aside. He yelled and fled, tumbling and struggling down the incline mad with terror. And while Hanuman listened to the diminishing uproar of his retreat, the wind fetched in a stupendous rain, a battering downpour that was to last all night and on into the morning. Yet even if he had had a dry place to take it, Hanuman thinks, he could never have got the record safe-it was too big, and those people were braver than he supposed.
They came in the morning even before the rain had ceased. They brought a priest, and oil, and torches, a dozen men with spears and arrows and axes. Fifty yards off in dense growth on the higher ground, Hanuman listened to a great droning of dog-Latin exorcism, prayers in the dialect, howling and pounding of metal to drive away Satan. He heard himself described two or three times by the scared (and very proud) young man, as twice the height of two tall men, with flaming nostrils that poured forth the stench of Hell, and a voice that turned a man’s blood to milk
Then there was real fire, and heaving smoke, and black scraps of priceless parchment floating out and down the hillside on the damp wind.
Hanuman came away to a clearing where he was accustomed to meet Peregrine and me, and Peregrine found him there and brought me word. When we were all three together-
We do not weep, Doctor. We come together, and-rest. As we had done after Ophis died, we went into thick woods, and I lay where Hanuman could lean against me with Peregrine in his arms. We rest. We abandon thought, memory, sorrow, everything except our trusting and healing nearness to each other; for this, together with our imperfect but perfectible knowledge of natural law, is the only aspect of life that will never deceive or betray us. After that time of retreat, we at length roused ourselves, to consider how to take up our task of record making once more, from the beginning.
We returned to this continent. Another raft of vines and branches securely woven by Hanuman with what clumsy help I could provide; another crossing of that fogbound channel, our last I don’t think I could swim it now, pulling a raft. Before we crossed, Peregrine had surveyed the ranges from Alaska to the southern Sierras. Of many good places, Mount Charity seemed the best for our needs.
Standing on its flat summit you are in the center of a vast bowl, and the bottom of the bowl is the green jade of treetops. They clothe a valley so many-angled, so tumbled and broken up with lesser elevations and spurs of the greater peaks, that it should N- hardly be called a valley at all. There are small lakes, and streams A river flows off underground, and where it emerges, if it does, even I have never been sure. And all around the summit, where the winds are never violent, stand the snow-topped giants. They look as though a shout might reach them, though the nearest one, says Peregrine, is twenty-four miles away. For the last ten or fifteen years, of course, the air has not been that clear, but we remember.
We knew men would never come there for grazing livestock, let alone clearing and farming: little enough for even goats to find. But for us there has been rich plenty. The needles of western pine and larch for us are sustaining food. We brought with us the seeds of European herbs we have grown used to, and they have naturalized well. Myrtle also grows there, which we enjoy, in patches of open ground near our cave. There is in particular one little meadow directly below us. It is really a large outcropping of rock, slightly tilted, so that over the centuries enough soil has built up there to support small plants, wild grasses, though not trees. To us this is the loveliest of all the world’s meadows. We have thought of it and tended it as our garden since 1377. You probably remember that Edward III of England died that year, one of the great princes whose masterpiece was the Hundred Years’ War. And a man who served him as soldier, valet, envoy, political handyman, and compared to whom (in my view) Edward and nearly all the other monarchs of European history were not much more than hop toads in fancy clothes, was then getting on for forty-a friend of yours, I believe, Geoffrey Chaucer. (I hope you’ll excuse my slipping in to look at your books a couple of months ago, when nobody was around and you left the door on that l
oose latch.) Yes, that little meadow has been our garden for very nearly six hundred years.
Indians traveled by once in a great while, making use of an open space farther down the mountainside for their overnight camps on journeys across the range. Those had to be important journeys, for they disliked and dreaded the dark forest of the lower ground, and the cruel passes through the heights. We learned from their talk that when they reached this place they called Mount Charity they felt safe. “Charity” is the nearest English translation we can find, but in the original there was some overtone of the supernatural, for they imagined themselves in the presence of a friendly spirit who would grant travelers protection so long as they were careful not to outstay their welcome. Later, I regret to say, this benign legend may have taken on an odd flavor of Wolf Spirit. If we have the future hours together that I hope we may, Doctor, you might ask me about that sometime.
Our cave entrance is obscure: we helped nature. The cave itself is an immense fissure directly underlying the mountain’s summit.
A main gallery runs inward a hundred yards. There are side galleries; at the end of one is a pool that receives sweet water from every rain and has nourished our contemplation for the centuries. In another, daylight enters from a crack in the western face of the cliff thirty feet above the cave floor: there is our library, and our record; there Hanuman works, reached by the sun for a little while in the evenings, and in the dark he has the candles he himself makes from bayberry and other sources. At certain seasons the moon is with him.
A rock fall-we think at least a thousand years ago-.closed up the lower part of the cave entrance. The upper part can be shut, if we choose, with an artificial rock we made, convincing to look at, if you have the enterprise to scramble up a steep-slanted boulder under the cliff’s overhang and peer in at it, but not very strong. So far as we know, the Indians never came up to look at it. Maybe they would have felt it a trespass on the spirit’s dwelling place. A good spelunker would catch on to it in no time, or for that matter an enterprising Boy Scout.
Paper was again a problem. It cost us a few years of experiment and trouble to work out a method of manufacturing it ourselves from oat grass. In the fourteenth century we could still feel we might have plenty of time. To this day, on Mount Charity, you can find small clearings where an odd type of oat grass still seeds itself in yearly. We have helped it a little, to be sure, for sentimental reasons. Naturally as soon as the Spanish settlements in California were stable enough to provide us with paper, we were ready with Hanuman’s light fingers and my quiet feet, and we enjoyed the game almost as much as in old times. But your antiquarians and possibly your chemists may someday be interested in studying the paper we made: it is flexible even now, safe to handle with care, and most of Hanuman’s ink shows up as sharply as yesterday.
There is great plenty of it, for Hanuman was determined to bring back from his memory every page of the lost account, while also dealing with the constant flow of new events, as Peregrine brought word from other continents and I came in with more about the Indian world of North and South America. You see the importance of that, Doctor, considering what slight concern the white pioneers had for the history of any people but themselves.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are enormously documented, and I daresay all the important facts can be found in the human records. Nevertheless Hanuman wishes to bring his account to the present time, if only because (we hope) there is a value in the viewpoint of three thousand years.
Doctor, I think we are tiring you excessively. You look-
Please, go on!
I’ll take it up again, Lykos. We weren’t too worried, Doctor, when the Union Pacific came into Portland-it was far away. The road linking Eugene with Boise did frighten us, but-
They’re after Mount Charity.
Yes, Doctor. We ought to have been making ready for flight seventy odd years ago, when the horseless carriage started driving the stables out of business. But our foresight is only a little better than human. And like you we have that way, that human way, of imagining the cup may pass.
Several years ago a trail across the southern part of our bowl in the hills was widened and blacktopped. Now a spur, a scenic highway, is to be driven all the way to the flat summit of Mount Charity. The summit will be developed, as they call it, into a parking lot for an estimated eight hundred cars. There is to be a hotel in our garden, which the developers have already named, in their blueprints, Overlook Inn-The Home of Creative Viewing.
Christ! Let me think-I have some money-
Not enough for what you’re thinking, Doctor. Sit quiet, please. Rest. Peace. Let me tell you what our hope is, much more modest. Work won’t start on this obscenity until next summer, maybe not then. Some environmentalists are already fighting it. They can’t win-too many more urgent things demand their effort and funds, and the money back of the hotel thing is big-but they will delay it, and that wins us time. Could you remodel this house a little? maybe a bigger cellar, some other things-to give us a hiding place and storage for our records, for ten or fifteen years-
Yes. Yes, anything, whatever I have. My God, l must write a will, so that the kids will have the place. Stupid of me to neglect it so long, but I get tired easily-discouraged
Please rest yourself while I finish, Doctor. We must have the young people in it, yes. We’ll need their help. But . . . you understand, don’t you? If the secret of our existence is known too soon, Hanuman’s effort to complete the story is done for. Even supposing the best, supposing there were no immediate wish to destroy us, to be smothered in your people’s good intentions would be as lethal as-as the Pentagon trying to make me tell them all the good news of Russian and Chinese military
Stop a moment, Peregrine. That sickens me too much.
I’m sorry, Doctor. It was a foolish example .... May I go on?
Yes.
We came to you first, and you only, because we have no one else. You understand, your students-some changes in the group each summer, and we can’t follow them, study them. I told you, we studied you a long while before we dared approach. So, now, will you tell us which of these young people we can trust for secrecy? You know them. We don’t.
Trust them all.
This is my one piece of human knowledge you must accept. Trust them all, Peregrine. Oh-wonderful-even if I only dream it! To know the past, make ft a truer guide! Something I can do not just preach while the time runs out-
Peregrine
He’s dead. His heart couldn’t bear joy.
Yes, that was joy .... I hear the cars. He wrote no will, Lykos. They won’t have this place. They’ll find some way to help us. Brut-what if
Then it happens. But Peregrine, we must stop waiting for perfection. And I think this generation is something new on Earth. They are the first to understand they could lose their world-their world, Peregrine-and my heart tells me they are too good to let it go. Come with me. We’re going to them now, and we will trust them all.
<
* * * *
* * * *
George Alec Effinger, another Clarion alumnus, is in his early twenties, wears his hair long, and is known as Piglet to anyone who knows him at all. (His best friend when he first came to New York was named Edward Bear, thus the nickname.) All the Last Wars at Once is a story he wrote to work off a feeling of weltschmerz over the antics of current humanity: “I think every problem we have could be solved immediately if only the parties involved would just act their age,” he says, and so he wrote this black humor story of a future when people get together to solve their conflicts in the stupidest way possible. Have you noticed how often human logic continues to work just as well when you turn it upside-down?
ALL THE LAST WARS AT ONCE
George Alec Effinger
We interrupt this p—
—upt this program to—
—terrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this bulletin pieced together from the archives of the General
Motors Corporation.
“Good afternoon. This is Bob Dunne, NBC News in New Haven, Connecticut. We’re standing here in the lobby of the Hotel Taft in New Haven, where the first international racial war has just been declared. In just a few seconds, the two men responsible will be coming out of that elevator. (Can you hear me?)
“—elevator. Those of you in the western time zones are probably already—”
The elevator doors opened. Two men emerged, smiling and holding their hands above their heads in victorious, self-congratulatory boxers’ handshakes. They were immediately mobbed by newsmen. One of the two men was exceptionally tall, and black as midnight in Nairobi. The other was short, fat, white, and very nervous. The black man was smiling broadly, the white man was smiling and wiping perspiration from his face with a large red handkerchief.
“—C News. The Negro has been identified as the representative of the people of color of all nations. He is, according to the mimeographed flyer distributed scant minutes ago, Mary McLeod Bethune Washington, of Washington, Georgia. The other man with him is identified as Robert Randall La Cygne, of La Cygne, Kansas, evidently the delegate of the Caucasian peoples. When, and by whom, this series of negotiations was called is not yet clear.
Universe 1 - [Anthology] Page 20
