She caught herself uttering a strange, low sound. It escaped from her throat involuntarily.
Two men were pushing their way through the jungle beneath her. One was a mechanic—she couldn’t remember his name. The other was the plump little cook, Perry. Her throat seemed to vibrate as she uttered the sound again. Perry paused, looked around, but not up; then the two men moved on. Spring relaxed. She bore them no ill will, but they were encroaching on her territory, the jungle...
That night she dreamed bizarre dreams of a land she’d never seen. She was alone in this land, and she was hungry. The hunger fed the power that surged through her body and she paced to the edge of the forest. The small creatures ran aside, sensing that she hunted. Other creatures were less perceptive. They went about their complicated business as though she weren’t there—monkey-shaped creatures with complicated rituals, motley pelts and little strength: men.
She watched them from the shadows and her belly was a chasm of longing. They chattered, chanted, clashed metal objects and blew through pipes. They stripped off their pelts and rubbed them on river rocks. They rode elephants. Only their numbers made them difficult prey. They were weaker than the boar, softer than the ghavial, more cowardly than the bull and smaller than the elephant. But they were many and she was one.
Then a solitary man approached the forest.
“I told you. Hell, I told you she was dangerous.”
The second regarded the mutilated remains, his stomach heaving. “Oh, God. You’re saying she did this, First?”
“No doubt about it. Look at those scratches. Those were made by human fingernails.”
“But... He’s... He’s been emptied out. Where are his organs and such? Hell, First, he’s been disemboweled. She wouldn’t do that. No human being would do that.”
“But the big cats would. That’s what they used to do. They’d make their kill, then they’d eat the soft parts first. The entrails. The delicacies.”
“Oh, God. Don’t talk like that.”
“She’s out there, you know. She’s out there listening, sniffing, waiting. We can’t treat her like a human being—she’d kill us all. She’s reverted to type.” The first stared at the green curtain of the jungle. “We should have hunted her down right at the start.”
“You can’t hunt down a woman, First.” Another crew member spoke. “Okay, so she’s different. But not this different. I can’t believe she did this. Hell, we don’t know what monsters are out there. Anything could have got him. This jungle is full of possibilities!”
As the day went by and another night approached, their fears grew. They lit huge fires and crouched beside them, staring into the blackness around. They huddled close and whispered horror stories to each other, and whimpered at every sound.
Meanwhile, out in the forest, Captain Spring slept alone—or not really alone, because in truth she would never be alone again. She had drunk the water that in years to come would be called “bor.” Nobody else had drunk from the river yet; that would come later. The ship’s instruments had detected something peculiar in there, tiny living organisms with an unusual unity of purpose. So the microbiologists took samples for analysis and for the time being everybody drank rainwater.
In the morning the first officer gathered his posse. “I’m not going through another night like that. I doubt if I slept ten minutes. We’re going out there today and we’re going to hunt that thing down.”
“The captain?” One of the officers looked doubtful.
“We’re going to hunt down whatever killed our man. Maybe it isn’t the captain—I could be jumping to conclusions.” Wisely, the first was adjusting his position. “Maybe it’s an indigenous carnivore. Whatever it is, it has a taste for Man now, and it’ll come back for more. We have to get to it first.”
Now she stood beside a fern-fringed lagoon, naked and glistening in the sun. Motley bats fluttered about her and other small creatures had gathered, too—a beaverlike thing with a smiling duckbill, a varied shoal of fish with big-O mouths, tiny spider monkeys that wove webs to catch drifting spores, and many others. They all gathered around Spring in unafraid curiosity. She was the only carnivore they had ever met. They examined her, twittered at her, sat on her.
Spring was changed. She watched them all with her amber eyes and she registered what she saw from three conflicting viewpoints: human, feline—and alien. Sometimes she smiled, sometimes she uttered her low growl; and when she growled the creatures moved away. They were learning fast.
Spring hadn’t eaten for a day and a night. The hunger aroused a threefold tension in her mind, which was why she stood smiling and growling at the lagoon, irresolute.
She heard voices and a crashing in the bushes. The tip of a laser rifle waved like a deadly banner above a field of arrowreed. The animals scattered, leaving Spring alone. Snarling, she turned, backing into a cave within the root system of a giant tree.
“You hear that? I heard something. Over there!”
Next, Perry’s voice. “Don’t shoot! For pity’s sake don’t shoot! Wait until you see it properly...”
Now Perry, clutching the rifle that he’d brought just for show, followed the others to the water’s edge.
“She’s around here somewhere.” The first’s head snapped this way and that. “I can smell her. Like a zoo.”
Perry, about to say something, suddenly found himself turning around.
Later, he could never admit to himself exactly what he saw. Afterward, he described to others how he saw Spring emerging from behind a twisted tree. He told himself that, too. He saw a beautiful, naked woman with extraordinary eyes, a wealth of auburn hair and a wonderful figure, walking their way.
He did not—not even for an instant—see a Bengal tiger, eyes blazing as it paced toward them, muscles rippling and gathering, tail flicking, ready to charge. Maybe some other Perry saw that, some other fat cook on some other happentrack.
Spring said, “Hello, men. Could someone lend me a jacket? My clothes fell in the river.”
The silence, the stillness. The first officer like a statue, the guns pointing carefully nowhere. The moment when it must be done, if it was going to be done at all. And Perry taking two quick steps away from the hunting party toward the quarry, getting in the line of fire. Unhesitatingly he did this, still uncertain whether that quarry was animal or human, only certain that it did-n’t matter. And the quarry herself, very much a lovely woman, smiling at them all and walking toward them with a swaying grace that was almost feline, but totally feminine...
And the first was peeling his thermocoat off, while the others grinned foolishly, unable to look away from all this beauty.
“Here,” said the first. “Put this on. And then maybe you can help us, Captain. There’s some kind of dangerous animal around here. We’ve lost a man. You have more of an empathy with this kind of country—no offense intended. Perhaps you’ll join us.”
“And where have you been all this time, anyway?” asked Perry.
Perry was forgotten by history, but Captain Spring captured the imagination of ages. Not only because of what she did, but also because of what she was, a tiger-woman of exceptional beauty—some say the most beautiful woman who ever lived, although standards change. In recognition of what she was and what she did, humans found a place for her in The Song of Earth—just a verse or two, but enough to ensure her fame. At first reviled as a villainess as notorious as the earlier Marilyn, she later became a heroine, when bor was recognized for what it was: a great gift to Mankind. And now, who is to say whether bor is good or bad? The only certain thing is that Earth is a different place because of it.
The captain and crew of the Golden Whip were rescued from the planet Talk-to-Yourself six standard months later and taken back to Earth. Before the Macrobes—which were the active constituents of bor—were isolated, they had spread. Their advantages became apparent, so their carriers were outlawed by the heads of Earth...
Ages later, the Macrobes resurfaced in a felina named Karina, daughter
of El Tigre, who passed them on to her son John.
The centuries passed, and the Macrobes reappeared in the body of a young poet named Jimbo in a village then called Puerto Este...
The Captain was a Specialist of feline-human link.
She brought to Earth the captivating seeds of Inner
Think.
So runs a couplet in The Song of Earth.
The Little Passenger
It’s what you do when you’ve done everything else.
There was a little man on Dream Earth who was doomed to many years of living among people much bigger and more beautiful than he and who, through his own foolishness, had lost a chance of real love. In his time he’d had many names and now, like the Girl, he had none. And like many Dream People before him, he’d given up hope. So there was nothing to be lost by taking a certain step into a world that—yet again—seemed exciting and different. A world of action and adventure, with perhaps a seasoning of real danger... He could even persuade himself that it was a courageous and creditable thing to do.
So the little man, trembling, did it.
The Song of Earth relates his adventures in the normal dimensions of Dream Earth, as though he were a secondary character. Now, however, for a short time, he becomes a principal, with several stanzas to himself, commencing:
There came a little passenger who climbed aboard the Train.
His heart was full of sadness and his eyes were full of pain.
He’d been scared when he joined the Skytrain and he was still scared. All around him people were laughing, drinking, yelling, quarreling—the women blonde and brassy and bouncy-beautiful, in the current vogue, and the men strong and handsome. Strong enough to break him in half. Beside him, a tall suntanned man told endless stories of hunting and valor, of facing the charging rhino and of the sniveling coward who fled. The Great White Hunter stared challengingly around often, as though sniffing the air for cowards. It seemed to the scared little man that the hunter sniffed him out every time.
Meanwhile, the carriage swayed and the metallic clicking of rail joints sounded as a counterpoint to the brittle laughter. It was dark outside, but occasionally a tiny gleam passed by. Whether these were lighted houses or stars, the little passenger had no way of knowing. Mostly the black windows showed merely a reflection of the inside of the carriage and the bluff, noisy travelers. What was he doing here? Whatever had possessed him to ride the Skytrain?
More to the point, why hadn’t he at least had the sense to wait a few years until he’d built up the psy to Bigwish himself into some more suitable form?
A small girl cuddled near, watching him with big doe eyes. She had pointed ears and there was a brownness about her, a toylike furriness. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Her voice was childlike and squeaky. “Aren’t all these people just the nicest? I love a train, too. Don’t you?”
“Yes.” There was something artificially naive about her that the little passenger found even more subtly frightening than the more brazen characters around. She would go to her death without ever finding out what the world was really like.
And who can say she isn’t better off? thought the little man wildly. He remembered the ballroom and the blue rain and his hopeless quest, and he wished he were back in Dream Earth, where at least he could control his own destiny. Here on the train a smallwish had no effect, so it seemed. His psy seemed to be drained, flowing into a common pool.
Nearby, a tall person of indeterminate sex—who had introduced himself earlier as Psycaptain Hilary Yes—leaned forward, caught his eye and began to relate the tale of the Invisible Spaceship on a foray near the dread Red Planet. He’d heard the story twice already, when the psycaptain had told it to a heavy-jowled man and then to a bejeweled blonde. The psycaptain’s crew had aged forty years in ten minutes, so the story went, and their teeth had dropped out. Their bones had turned to jelly and they had collapsed to the ship’s nebulous deck, quivering blobs of protoplasm. The psycaptain
himself had escaped with a flesh wound. The little passenger didn’t want to hear it again.
“What do men fear most?” the psycaptain asked. “Not death. Not maiming. But age. The gradual, horrible rotting away of mind and body. And that is the weapon of the Red Planet. They have the power to—”
“Excuse me.” The little passenger stumbled to his feet and fled. He ran up the central aisle, through the connector, and found himself in a dark passage leading through the tender of the Locomotive. He paused, then pressed forward again. He would talk to the driver of this train, and ask to be let off...
But when he saw the scene in the cab of the Celestial Steam Locomotive, he very nearly went right back to his seat.
He heard the singing first, a solitary, rough voice raised in lusty song:
Broach me a bottle of Old Jamaica,
Heave-ho! and down she goes!
Drink with the Devil and meet your Maker,
Heave-ho! and down she goes
The cab held two men lit by the fearsome glow of the furnace, one bent and shoveling coal into the roaring flames with a long-handled shovel, the other leaning against the spectacle plate, a bottle of dark liquid in one hand, steadying himself with the other hand, singing at the top of his voice.
“Heave-ho! and down she goes!” And on each ho! the fireman’s shovel clanged against the open doors of the firebox and another load of coal scattered across the inferno. “Steady there, me old shipmate!” called the driver. “Avast there! That’s enough for now!” But the fireman shoveled on, working steadily and inexorably. The driver shrugged, raised the bottle to his lips and took a deep swig, then caught sight of the little passenger lurking in the shadows. “Ahoy there, my lad!” he shouted. “And who might ye be?”
“I have no name.”
“Yesself, are ye? By the Powers, I admire ye for it!” The driver put down the bottle and lurched forward, and it became apparent that he was a cripple, with a wooden leg and crutch. He swayed with the motion of the Locomotive, a big, strong figure with a large, pale face, smiling. “And what might an upstanding fellow like you be a-doin’ here, among the muck and din?”
The Locomotive heeled and shuddered as it clattered over phantom crossovers with a shriek of chafing steel. The fireman shoveled on, an apparition clad in a swirling black cloak and a hood that covered his head and concealed his features—Unsuitable dress for his work, thought the little man.
“I’ve come to ask a favor...” He was even more nervous. The smiling features of the driver failed to reassure him. There was a wrongness about the hectic scene in the cab. The furnace seemed to draw him, the flames churning within the firebox like a maelstrom. Why didn’t the fireman stop stoking and close the doors? There was a red mark on the pressure gauge at 250, and the needle stood slightly beyond it.
The driver suddenly observed this, and with an oath he hurled himself at the regulator and jerked it wider. The throbbing of the exhaust deepened and quickened. “Blessed safety valve’s jammed tight, messmate!” he shouted back at the little man. “Only way to get the pressure down is to use more steam going faster. Lay off stoking, will ye, else ye’ll blow us all to kingdom come!” he said to the fireman, who ignored him, shoveling on. He turned back to the little man. “A favor, ye say? Never let it be said that Long John Silver refused a shipmate a favor!”
“I’d like to get off the train.”
Silver’s face changed instantly, becoming deadly serious. He staggered close, speaking quietly. “Well, now, that ain’t so easy, my lad. Y’see, you’re important to the voyage. Each and every passenger has a dooty to the train and ye wouldn’t be shirking yer dooty now, would ye? Ye wouldn’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth o’ tar, would ye?” He took a long drag at his bottle, belched and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“I don’t understand. What difference does it make if I get off?”
“Well, shiver me timbers.” Silver was laughing, tears running down his broad cheeks. “Here’s a pretty state of affairs. He
re’s a pretty kettle o’ fish. What d’ye think keeps this here Train going, eh? Has there ever been a Train like it before, eh? Can ye tell me, lad—has there ever been a Train as can fly to the stars like a comet? Has there ever been a Train as can sail through the sun and come out the other side no hotter’n she went in? Messmate, this here ain’t no ordinary Train. Why, ye’re free to walk the full length, a thousand cables and more—free and welcome. Ye’re free to enjoy yesself more’n ye ever thought a poor man could—there’s fun enough for all on the Train. But ye must stay. And above all, ye must believe...” His voice dropped to a portentous whisper and he leaned forward, propped on his crutch, staring into the little man’s eyes. “What d’ye see on my shoulder, shipmate?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing... Coal dust maybe. What do you mean?”
“Mebbe a parrot?” Silver’s tone was menacing. “Mebbe a parrot named Cap’n Flint?”
“Well, maybe.” Terror chilled the little man’s spine as Silver loomed over him. The shovel rang against the firebox like a knell.
“Damn your eyes, ye lie!” Silver shouted the words into the little passenger’s face. “There ain’t no parrot on my shoulder, nor ever will be—leastwise, unless ye believe it!” Balancing unsteadily on one leg he raised his crutch as though to smash it upon the other’s skull.
“There is! There is!”
And there was.
Captain Flint sat on Silver’s shoulder, shuffling emerald wings. He stared at the little man with a knowing eye. “Pieces of eight!” he screeched.
“Ah-hah!” Silver backed off, tucking the crutch under his arm. “Now get this into that head o’ yers, lad. If ye can believe in the parrot, ye can believe in the Train. And if ye can believe in the Train, then there ain’t no way we can afford to let you off. Because y’see, shipmate, we need every bit o’ belief we can muster!”
“You mean...” The little man passed a tongue over his lips. The furnace seemed to be sucking the moisture from his body. “You mean this is all a composite smallwish? The Locomotive, the rest of the Train—a smallwish?” Now the terror was in every bone of his body, chilling him despite the heat. “What would happen if everyone stopped believing? Where would we be?”
The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) Page 17
