The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  Lord Shout was watching the Mole. “What’s he... like?” he asked. “I mean, what’s he really like as a person? He’s my own son, and I don’t have any idea what kind of a man he is.”

  Eloise felt pity for Lord Shout. “He’s good. He’s good and kind and clever—very clever, even though he doesn’t know as much as you or I about the real world yet. A big part of his mind works like the Rainbow, calculating... He may not need me much longer. He can probably build all he needs on the things I’ve shown him. He’ll go on and invent a world that isn’t much different from the real one.”

  The Mole was changed. Instead of lying limply against the wall, he now sat, his arm appendages caressing the floor, his foot things twitching as he walked in imagination through the gentle world that Eloise had created for him. His puttylike color had improved and his breathing had deepened.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Lord Shout.

  “Exploring.”

  “By himself? Shouldn’t you be in there with him?”

  “Not all the time. He’s very inventive. He must get used to the bare outlines I’ve given him, first. There’s plenty for him to discover for himself. Plenty of logical extensions to the ideas I’ve given him.”

  Lord Shout watched his son. “But... you say he’s inventive. Suppose he invents something that harms him.”

  Eloise said something he didn’t understand. “The worst thing I can imagine is that he might trip over a hypotenuse. It’s all mental, Lord Shout. Nothing in there is real.”

  “It’s as real as the Mole is likely to get,” said Lord Shout doubtfully.

  Eloise’s eyes were hollow from lack of sleep, her frame pulpy from a lifetime of inaction. “Do you think I could rest now?” she asked. She coughed—a hoarse sound from deep in her chest. “I’m so tired.”

  Looking at her, a new worry came to Lord Shout.

  The wind blew against the Mole. It was irritating. He tried to think it away, but it persisted because Eloise made it do so. A tree appeared on the plain, tossing in the wind and scattering leaves. It creaked and a leaf hit the Mole sharply. He flinched. The tree wouldn’t go away. He didn’t want it in his mind, yet it stayed.

  “This is the real world, Mole,” said the gentle alien whose designation appeared to be Eloise.

  He’d already grasped the idea of another person with free will sitting in his mind. It interfered with his thoughts, but it was little different from another person sitting physically beside him, interfering with his body. He hadn’t, however, grasped the idea of replying.

  So he accepted—the way he accepted a proven hypothesis. And with that, things began to move fast. The sky darkened with heavy clouds and rain began to fall, drenching and chilly. Trees sprang up all over the plain and the wind was full of their leaves. He glided through this stinging blizzard, unable to control his environment. Soon he began to enjoy himself.

  Reaching the banks of a fast river, he flung himself into the current. He was swept away. He watched the banks slide past and, choosing his moment, pulled himself ashore.

  The rain had stopped and the clouds had gone. He was in a quiet glade. Creatures, Things, were cropping the grass. They had slender necks and long-lashed brown eyes, and they glanced at him shyly as they ate.

  The Eloise told him they were guanacos.

  They were—he sought for the concept—beautiful creatures and he liked them. They were gentle and meant no harm to anyone. He watched them, content to let this new world take its course and take him with it. But soon he discovered the drawback to this kind of world.

  A jaguar, all rippling muscles and bared teeth, charged from the bush, knocked down the smallest guanaco and bit into its neck. Then, as the Mole rose from the ground in alarm, it saw him, snarled and padded away silently.

  The guanacos had all fled except for one that lay twitching on the grass. The Mole approached it, unaccountable sensations building in his mind, sensations that seemed to spread to the rest of his body. In sorrow and pity, the Mole watched the guanaco. It looked back at him, but it didn’t really see him. Everything else had gone; the Mole was not even sure the trees were there. There was just the dying guanaco and himself. Then the guanaco shuddered and stopped breathing, and there was just the Mole.

  And now he couldn’t simply accept the situation. There were tears in his soul, and he looked into the Greataway and said, “Why, for God’s sake?”

  The Death of Eloise

  Zozula had been searching for three days.

  He’d fought the Rainbow, which persisted in scanning everything but what it was instructed to scan. His meals had been brought to him personally because the valets were not functioning. The air was becoming stale and he suspected that the conditioning plant had failed—which could mean the death of everyone in the Dome when the next Chokes came.

  On the odd occasions when the Rainbow had allowed him to see Dream Earth, he’d been horrified. It was as though the computer had deliberately set itself the task of driving every neotenite mad by indulging in crazy pyrotechnic effects at the same time that it systematically transformed the Dome into a place unfit for habitation.

  Why? Only two people might know the answer: The Mole and the Girl. One had been defeated by the Rainbow already and the other was trapped in there.

  Zozula rubbed his eyes, jerking awake as a herd of elephants lumbered across the Rainbow Room, trumpeting their alarm at some forgotten historical incident. A cleaning cavy nibbled at his clothing, while another disposed of a tray of spilt food at his feet. At least they were animals and not subject to the Rainbow’s whims. A raccoon-nurse approached, bringing another tray. He motioned her away. He wasn’t hungry. He was too tired to eat.

  He stood, rubbing the circulation back into his legs and remembering—yet again—that he hadn’t practiced his Inner Think lately. It seemed he felt older every day.

  The time had come to face the others and admit defeat. He would be replaced as head Cuidador, of course. Probably Selena would take his place; she deserved it and she was a good, kind woman. She’d come to visit him often during these last eternal days and nights when the history of aeons and the mathematics of genius spun past his eyes, and she’d comforted him and tried to take part of the blame herself.

  He erased the elephants with difficulty and took one last look at Dream Earth. For once the effects didn’t look too bad. The sky was blue and the fields green, and a milkmaid was strolling down a footpath carrying empty pails to a byre. A curiously peaceful and relaxing scene, and there were very few Dream People in sight.

  Some fool must be setting this up for a tactical strike, thought Zozula bitterly. It’s just the kind of violent contrast these people love.

  Annoyed, he wiped the scene out and made for the door. The nurse walked alongside, concerned over his appetite. He motioned her away again, accidentally tilting her tray. Washdogs and cavies darted in. He reached the door, which slid aside reluctantly.

  Eloise stood outside.

  She was thinner, and the flesh had dropped away from her face, so that her neotenite origins were less apparent. Her body was still incurably gross, however, and the clothing drooped from the upper part of her body, showing fatty, immature breasts.

  “Is everything all right?” asked Zozula anxiously, as he led her to a couch and a washdog began to clean her.

  A paroxysm of coughing doubled her up and Zozula saw she had lost most of her hair. Gathering her breath, she said, “Everything’s fine, except...”

  “Except what?”

  Suddenly she burst out, “It’s cruel, what everybody’s doing in this Dome. Taking people into the Rainbow and leaving them there. Breeding people and killing them. Keeping thousands of people alive who would be better off dead—people like me... And the Mole—it would have been much kinder if I’d left him alone instead of prying into his mind. He had a good world of his own in there, but now I’ve had to teach him all about killing and I’ve turned his world upside down.”

  “Is he...
?”

  “Oh, he’s all right. He’s nearly ready to die in the Rainbow, if that’s what you want.” She stared at him wildly, blinked, bowed her head and mumbled, “What’s the use? It’s all predestined anyway. Everything’s happening the way Trevis said.”

  “Does the Mole die in there? If so...”

  “On some happentracks he does. Isn’t that bad enough?” Now she was watching Zozula again, and for the first time she realized the extent of his exhaustion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault. And you have your problems, too.” She drank from a cup the nurse handed her and relaxed with a little shudder.

  Zozula said simply, “I can’t get the Girl out of there.” Tired and weak, he buried his face in his hands.

  “You mean you can’t reincorporate her? Or is she just lost?”

  “She’s lost. I should never have left her alone there. But the Rainbow is so damned big. And now the special effects—”

  “I don’t want to hear about the special effects,” said Eloise. “You’ve got to have a better reason for wanting her out of there. After all, she won’t come to any harm.” She stared at him fixedly. “Can’t anyone in this Dome show a glimmering of human decency, just once?”

  There was nothing to lose except his dignity, and since Eloise could read his mind, Zozula had lost that already. Carefully, wanting to get the words right, he said, “We Cuidadors do not have children, as you know. Generations ago we used to, but they were all... defective, and so in the end it was agreed that we would depend on the genetic program on the People Planet to supply our successors. So we’ve never known what it’s like to have children of our own. My wife, Eulalie... She chose the Girl as her successor and I went along with it. At the time it didn’t matter to me much who succeeded her; I couldn’t think about anything beyond the fact that I’d lost Eulalie.

  “Then, gradually, I began to get to know the Girl. Oh, at first I found her unattractive and demanding, but I made allowances. She’d come from a place where she could have anything she wanted just by asking for it, and she’d suddenly found the real world isn’t like that. So she complained a lot. But she had a lot of good in her, and a lot of courage, and soon she began to adapt. She fought to come to terms with the real world, and she didn’t give in. And soon she stopped asking to be put back where she’d come from. She actually preferred the real world, and all the hardships and pain, in spite of the fact that she could never live comfortably in it, not with a body like hers. She gave me hope for all the people in Dream Earth.

  “She was a fighter. If...” He looked away, embarrassed, then remembered that Eloise knew anyway. “If Eulalie and I could have had a child, I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter than the Girl.

  “And I left her somewhere in the Rainbow. And... And now I’m wondering if she’s decided she likes Dream Earth better after all, and intends to stay there.

  “I wouldn’t blame her.”

  After a while, Eloise said, “I’ll help you find her and get her out of there, Zozula. The Mole and I will help you, that is...”

  The Mole had been suffering through many days of bewilderment.

  When the Alien Thinker, the Eloise, had withdrawn from his world, a Vision had appeared. Instead of a mind thing it was a whole creature, like the guanaco in its three-dimensional mobility, but quite different otherwise. It was smaller and it was nakedly hairless and soft, and it had an inexplicable emotional content, like the guanaco kid, and yet not like it. It was disturbing and very pleasant, and it stayed with him for a while before it disappeared, moving physically beside his own physical body.

  So, alone again, he’d extrapolated on the landscape, and thought the guanacos back to their ancestors and beyond—much farther beyond, until eventually he was able to conceive a primal form. Fascinated, he conjectured upon the factors that would influence the development of such a form, and using an evolutionary theory more complex and accurate than the Rainbow’s latest version, he’d progressed far enough to create mentally a creature that bore a remarkable similarity to a gibbon—and incidentally and thought-provokingly, to the Vision.

  But he’d never been able to visualize the dawning of intelligence and the newer life-forms because, secure in his closed world, he had not conceived of the existence of the Greataway and Starquin, the Five-in-One.

  The Vision recurred from time to time during the succeeding days. It would come around a corner of his mind and walk across his landscape. He was unable to subject it to any real control; like the Eloise, it seemed to exist apart from him. It walked with a grace all its own. It stirred him in a way he couldn’t explain. He tried to capture it, to extrapolate on it, to trace it back to its origins, but he couldn’t. It was, and it was strangely beautiful, and he could-n’t control it. So he let it play with the gibbons and ride the stegosauruses.

  Then one day the Eloise was back.

  Quickly he asked it about the Vision.

  “I am she, Mole,” said the Eloise, and he knew that she was sad. “The Vision is myself, and I want you to think of it that way. You see, we won’t be meeting again. You’re going away, physically away, to a place where dreams will come much more easily and you’ll be able to share them with other people. So please take my Vision with you, and look after it always.”

  Then she stayed with him for a long time and walked through his world in the form of the Vision, and put things right where they were wrong—and, to his regret, obliterated the dinosaurs, which had been an enjoyable part of his evolutionary game. But she put so many wonderful things in their place that it was worth it: whales and stars and orchids, and humans with animal genes and beautiful faces.

  And before she left him forever, she gave him the final gift.

  A new creature appeared, and the Eloise merged his ego with it.

  “This is the real you, Mole,” she said.

  They buried Eloise beside a tall ironwood tree not far from the Dome. It did-n’t seem right to recycle her. After they’d tamped down the dark soil and returned to the Dome, Lord Shout said, “She’d been ill for some time, Zozula. She knew she would never see the delta and her people again.”

  “How does the Mole feel about this?” asked Zozula.

  “I have no way of knowing.” The Mole had been sitting quietly on the floor when they carried Eloise out and he was still sitting there, attended by the pretty nurse, Tashi.

  She looked up. “He’s fine, Lord Shout. Eloise was thinking to him just before she died.”

  “Does he know she’s dead?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well...” said Zozula uncertainly, thinking of Eloise’s pathetic, flabby body. “She wasn’t much.” In his way, he was trying to console Lord Shout.

  “The Mole isn’t much, either.”

  Zozula glanced at him and said, “According to Eloise, he’s ready for the Rainbow. Let’s get him to bed. Would you like to come and watch?”

  Lord Shout thought of the shelves, the drips and the electrodes. “No, I don’t think so.” He walked across to the Mole and kissed him briefly, and when he turned back there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you, Zozula,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality and everything. It’s time for us to go home now. My men are waiting outside.”

  “Us?” Zozula glanced at the Mole.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Lord Shout said evenly, as the nurse left the Mole and joined them. “Tashi is coming with me.”

  Zozula sighed. “I don’t need to remind you—”

  “No, you don’t. You made that point very clear. But I have to remind you, Zozula—there are other considerations in life besides the perpetuation of the species. After all, you and Eulalie... It’s a pity that Tashi and I can’t have children, but it’s not a disaster. The human race is far from extinct.” He held out his hand. “Goodbye, and thank you again.”

  Zozula clasped it. “Thank you for the Mole,” he said.

  Within an hour the Mole slipped quietly
into Dream Earth, and the Rainbow hardly noticed his coming.

  Elizabeth’s Retrenchment

  The Girl had left the Land of Lost Dreams several days previously. Elated by her success in the Forest of Fear and her defeat of Blind Pew, she had forced her way into the more normal planes of Dream Earth by sheer strength of psy. She was confident that she could return to the real world by the same method, but meanwhile she needed time to recuperate.

  She intended to use this time to good purpose. Her experiences in the real world with real people had made a profound impression on her. Zozula, Lord Shout, Eloise, the Cuidadors, Manuel—particularly Manuel—had taught her that there was no substitute for genuine relationships and emotions. She was longing to get back out there—contrary to Zozula’s worst fears—but meanwhile she was not unhappy. There was much to do. She had to instill a little sense into these phonies.

  Eulalie would have been proud of her.

  She visited the Coconut Shy, where people stood in a huge circle throwing stones at a crowd of whimpering, abandoned smallwishes, and she strode into the middle of them. Using her own psy, she galvanized the smallwishes and organized them into a quick-witted team that began to chuckle and dodge, catching the stones and throwing them back, making the Dream People look like fools, until the game was no fun anymore.

  “Who is this girl?” a powerful felino asked. The 122nd millennium was in vogue at the time.

  “I don’t know,” boomed an Us Ursa, “but she’s the ugliest creature I’ve ever seen! Is she real, or is she a smallwish? Wish her away, someone, and let’s get on with the game!”