We told everyone we felt like a little stroll. “Mind de sun,” warned Miz Rose, when we laid Moonbeam on her. We got into the bush and did a little search trip, and found a little patch of the mushrooms under a huge, flowering bush.
“Like we want to get reallyloaded, this time, right?” asked my old man, and he reached down and grabbed a couple of great big mushrooms and popped them into his mouth. I did the same, and we crawled under the bush, digging the sticky heat and the jungly noises and smells. We had that waiting feeling, like before something starts to work, but like, there’s no doubt when this stuff hits you . . . phew. . ..
And like there we were, again in the magic land of green, with all those funny little comic-strip characters balling and doing their things . . . but this time we didn’t just stay there. . ..
This time our heads got into a new place ... a very clear place . . . the greens were still there, but like we could see all the jungle sights and smell all the jungle smells and hear all noises, like we were some kind of animal or something. And I looked at my old man and, well shit, you really get some weird hallucinations on this stuff, because he looked all furry, like, and his hands and feet looked kind of like a duck’s! I told him that, and he opened his eyes . . . they looked enormous and green, like pearly jade . . . and he giggled and said, “Wow, you look like that, too. Metamorphosis. . . .” But I wasn’t too sure it was funny, cause usually you can tell what’s a hallucination and what isn’t, but this time I couldn’t. It kind of freaked me, but I didn’t want to say anything that might put him on a bummer.
After a few hours, we got up and walked around. The air felt surprisingly nice and cool, and we were really tripping out on all the sounds and sights and smells which we never imaginedexisted before.
We ate some fruit, but mostly we felt really hungry for some more of those mushrooms, so we ate some, but they didn’t get us any higher, just kept us in the same place . . . well into the night, when we found that we were really into seeing in the dark.
Animals and snakes came near us and didn’t seem to be on any hostility or fear trips. We petted them and fed them some fruit and really grooved with their vibes. Finally we curled up under a bush and went to sleep, figuring we’d surely be down by tomorrow, and looking our usual selves.
But the next morning we were as high as ever and I was getting kind of scared . . . like how were we going tostay this way? With everything so high and clear and hallucinating that we were one of Brother Jo’s fairy tales?
We figured that we’d better fall by his hut so he could give us something to make us come down, so we found our way to the edge of the village and tiptoed quietly inside. Some of Miz Rose’s daughters were there, getting ointment rubbed on their backs, but when they saw us in the doorway they started to jabber and bellow and throw things at us like we were King Kong or something!
“De do-do-mon! Brother Jo, de do-do-mon come here! Hurry now, give us someting for de do-do-mon!” Brother Jo didn’t understand them at first, but finally he did, and got just as freaked out and started fumbling for some of that bark he gave everyone before the crab hunt. When they swallowed it, we began to smell the most horribly nauseating, corpse-sweet smell, that made us retch and feel dizzy and sick as all hell. We ran out of there, and they ran after us, throwing anything they could get their hands on . . . and their aim was too fucking good!
We ran back into the cool and friendly bush and crawled under some high grasses to. vomit and rub our bruises, until we felt more or less okay again, though kind of shaken up.
And like we still didn’t come down. We figured we’d better quit eating the mushrooms, even though we were craving them . . . and we waited a while but ... we still looked the same.
We still didn’t come down.
* * * *
Well, shit, our heads have gone through a lot of changes about it since then. It’s been over a month now, and for a while we were really bum-tripped about the whole thing... especially my old man.
“You can’t be a revolutionary when you’re looking like a goddamn platypus,” he kept saying. But after a while he stopped worrying too much about the revolution . . . like it really isn’t important out here in the bush.
Then we started thinking how it would be kind of funny if we tried to go back to San Francisco and collect our welfare checks. That would really blow their minds . . . they could use us as “perfect examples of drug abuse” . . . but we don’t much need our welfare checks here. We’ve got the mushrooms and fruit, bushes to sleep and ball under . . . and we can spend our time watching all the green . . . the endless shades of green....
Anyway, we couldn’t have stayed in the village with no bread for rent or chocolate bars ‘n’ shit . . . and it would’ve really killed us to go back to the dead-end, head-fucking scene in the States. And, ya know, after we’d been out here a while, we started to lose a lot of that artificial brain-trip stuff that had been programmed into us since we were kids. Reading, writing . . . like, when you don’t use it, it just goes away. Like we’re so much into the here and now that we don’t much miss it. We’re getting into a heavy telepathy trip with the animals, insects, even the plants . . . this furry stuff keeps us nice and cool, and the webbed feet makes swimming kind of a gas. I don’t much care about all that “abstract,” human shit anymore . . . like I really wasn’t making it too well in their world.
The one problem is that we’re kind of lonely here, just me and my old man. There are others out here like us, but they’re pretty hard to rap with . . . they just sit and stare and eat the mushrooms . . . really spaced out.
My old man says, “If we could remember how to write, we could write to our social worker, Phil, to come and join us . . . if there was any paper out here ... or stamps ... or mailboxes.”
We’ve tried to go back to the village a few times and rap with the brothers and sisters there ... let them know there’s nothing to be afraid of . . . but, wow, they won’t even listen! They just freak out, eat that goddamn, awful smelling bark and chase after us with machetes . . . and how much can we take of those bad vibes?
There is one thing that’ll make me feel better, and I intend to do something about it real soon. The next time there’s a dark night with no moon, I’m going to sneak into the village and get little Moonbeam. I’m sure Miz Rose has been treating her real fine, but I want her out here with me . . . her funny, giggling ways would make such fine company. I can feed her some of the mushrooms. (What was it Brother Jo said? The do-do-mon takes children who have lost their parents . . . and if they eat what the do-do-mon gives them, then he keeps them, but if they won’t eat it, then the do-do-mon has to let them go . . . right on, Brother Jo.) But I know I can get Moonbeam to eat some of the mushrooms . . . she’s such a trusting little chickie. Then she could groove right along with us. She’d really dig it . . . really trip out on all the green ... all the endless prisms of green. ...
<
* * * *
* * * *
I don’t know how many sf stories I’ve read in which men travel back in time to hunt the beasts of prehistory . . . but Gordon Eklund’s story below is the first I recall in which the hunting is done in the far, far future—and the quarry are men, devolved and shambling, the last of their race. You have to wonder about a society that sends men on such an expedition. It’s a good thing we don’t have a society like that today.
STALKING THE SUN
by Gordon Eklund
Thalvin had remained inside the floater after the other two had bounded outside and gone running to inspect the kill. Thalvin wanted to take a careful look at the dashboard before going anywhere because once he’d heard a story about three hunters who’d forgotten to look and their floater had run away and fallen into a frozen lake and they’d been stranded a half-million years from home without any survival gear and two had died quickly while the third had miraculously been found by another party and taken home where he could relate his foolish story. Thalvin had gone hunting t
oo many times to make such an elementary mistake, so he took a careful look at the controls. When he was fully satisfied, he slid across the seat and stepped outside into the sharp thin air of the dying Earth. Thalvin had been up front too many times to die for any but the best of reasons.
The sun was a red dot lurking in one corner of the gray sky. The haze was thick and full. Thalvin walked through it, breathing slowly and carefully, stepping tenderly across the wet rotting ground, and joined the other two.
The man was busy at the rear of the kill. The woman stood near the head. Thalvin went to her and said, “What do you think, Gai?”
She shrugged without looking at him. “I’m supposed to think?”
“No,” he said, kneeling next to the animal’s face. He rolled back the heavy thick eyelids and looked. The eyes were white, streaked with wide red zigzagging lines. He put his mouth close to the beast’s nostrils. “It’s dead,” he said, and stood.
“Doesn’t it have to be?” Gai asked. “Jorgan shot it.”
“Nothing is ever certain,” Thalvin said, in a deliberate and instructive tone. “Things don’t die easily up here. One time—”
“A hunter thought one was dead,” Gai finished. “But it wasn’t really dead, only playing, and it stood right up and laughed at the hunter, then gobbled him lightly up. Isn’t that it, Thalvin?”
“That’s it,” Thalvin told his wife. He went around to the rear of the beast, leaving the head in her care. It was a big thing, this beast without a name. Thalvin, who’d seen and killed many of them, thought they were descended from the elephant. They were smaller, only about half as large as an Indian elephant, but had everything else—the ears, the tail, the trunk and the tusks.
“Don’t do that,” Thalvin said.
Jorgan looked up from where he was cutting the tail with the sharp edge of a long heavy knife. He smiled at Thalvin. The ground was spotted with thick pools of dry dark blood, the last instinctive spendings of the dead beast. “Why?” Jorgan asked. He was little more than a child, only twenty-eight years old. He was eight years younger than Gai and twenty-one years younger than Thalvin. Only a boy, Thalvin thought.
“Just leave it alone,” he said. “It’s dirty. What do you want with the tail? Take a tusk if you need a trophy.”
Jorgan frowned and stabbed at the ground with his knife. “Every working woman in the city has a pair of tusks hanging on her wall. We want something more exotic. You forget?”
“I remember,” Thalvin said. “But a tail? How can you prove it doesn’t belong to a butchered cow?”
“Leave that to me,” Jorgan said. He turned the knife and went back to cutting the tail.
Thalvin went away. His boots dug deeply into the decaying earth. He walked slowly.
Gai was burning off the tusks with her heatgun. Thalvin smiled at her and touched her arm. He said, “Let me do it. I can do it without damaging the tusks.”
“Would you?” she said, passing him the heatgun. She smiled at him and moved away. Even after ten years of marriage Thalvin hadn’t had his fill of that smile. Gai wasn’t an especially pretty woman, nor was she intelligent or witty. She was not an easy person with whom to live—even Ginler had recognized that—but she had a smile. Men very high in the chain—men higher than Thalvin or even Ginler—had openly coveted that smile, but none had ever possessed it for more than a few brief fleeting moments. None but her husbands—Ginler, Thalvin, and now Jorgan. None but those three.
Thalvin removed the tusks easily and carried them to the floater. Gai came with him and they waited for Jorgan. The boy had removed the tail and was now performing one of his special rites at the back of the slain beast.
Thalvin smoked.
Gai asked him, “Are we going any farther today?”
He said no. “It’ll be dark soon. Here darkness means blackness. The haze never lifts. There’s a protected spot near a stream. About ten miles from here. If the boy finishes with his gods, we may be able to make it before nightfall.”
“This disgusts you, doesn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“Religion. To a rational man like you.”
“No,” said Thalvin. “It doesn’t disgust me.” He looked up. “Here he comes. Slide over.”
Jorgan climbed into the rear seat of the floater. Gai turned to talk with him. Thalvin moved the machine across the landscape. Jorgan had delayed them and it was already moving toward darkness, but there was very little to worry about. The land was all the same here, flat and unmarked like a child’s torso. There were deep forests a hundred miles to the north and a massive ocean two hundred miles to the east. But this part of the future was all flat frozen plain that stretched for a thousand miles into the west and south.
Thalvin found the stream and followed it, looking for a good campsite. Jorgan and Gai chattered, comparing their trophies. Thalvin tried to ignore them. They were both acting like tourists and it irritated him. He expected it from the others but these two were his family. But, of course, neither of them had ever been up before. They had every right to act like tourists. Jorgan was too young and Ginler had never allowed Gai to come. Still, Thalvin didn’t like it.
Jorgan was talking to him. “Can we find something else tomorrow, Thalvin? Something better. After all, you did say—”
“I said this area was seldom hunted and that’s true. But I can’t guarantee that it’s worth hunting. We’ll have to see.”
“There ought to be a lot of game here,” Gai said.
“That’s true,” Thalvin said.
“I know you and Ginler used to come here. He would never have come if there wasn’t something to hunt. But where is it all? That thing back there with the big ears was all we’ve seen today.”
“What do we know?” Thalvin said. “Maybe at this time of the year all the big animals change into big fish and go off and live in the ocean. We know absolutely nothing about the creatures of this time. Except, how to kill them.”
Gai said, “Isn’t that enough?”
“Maybe so,” said Thalvin. “Here. This looks like a good spot to camp. We’ll stop here.”
He dropped the floater and helped the others out. It was cold here but not unbearably so. The three of them changed quickly into their heatsuits. The stream trickled gently in the night. In an hour, it would be frozen solid.
Thalvin went to the rear of the floater and got the gear. The first order of business was erecting the shield. This would prevent any big animals from straying into camp during the night and would also provide them with sufficient heat so that they could shed their thick heavy heatsuits. When the shield was set, Thalvin put up the tent, then opened three cans of concentrated food and passed them around.
The other hunters had all warned him; never bring your family with you, they’d said. All right, Thalvin thought. It was good advice. But how many other men had a wife like Gai? Not many, he knew, a wife who wouldn’t be able to recognize a negative reply when she heard it. Gai had wanted to come forward not because of herself but because of Jorgan. Thalvin had merely been an obstacle to be pushed easily aside. Gai had plans for Jorgan and these plans included a display of his courage and resourcefulness. There was only one way for a man to display these virtues in modern society. Go up, go hunting, and bring back something big and exotic and different. Gai had been fortunate that her other husband, Thalvin, was a researcher and hunter with a permanent permit allowing him open access to the far future. After that, everything had been simple. Now they were here, and all that was left was finding something suitably exotic for Jorgan to kill and making sure he pressed the lever at the proper moment. That was all. And then, up they’d go, she and Jorgan, climbing the chain toward success and dragging old Thalvin behind because he was too precious to be left alone. Gai wanted her station back. Ginler had died and she’d lost it. But not for long, not for long.
Poor Ginler, Thalvin thought. He and I make the same mistakes.
When they finished eating, Gai took Jorgan by t
he hand and led him into the tent. Thalvin sat outside watching their departure, then turned, smoking, and watching the stars of an alien night, dim flickering dots protruding vaguely through the thick obscuring haze. There wasn’t a moon here and Thalvin missed that more than anything. It had been gone a long time. There were a couple chunks of big rock still up there orbiting and many, many smaller pieces, but you could never actually see them because of the haze, and even if you could have, it wouldn’t have been enough for Thalvin. It was the moon he missed. That big calm yellow grinning moon.
Ginler. Thalvin was thinking of Ginler now, the old one. It wasn’t more than six months ago that he’d died, right near here, not more than a hundred miles from this spot. Thalvin had been with him at the time. He’d carried the body home and told the story. Crushed by some sort of giant ape, big as a house. Dead before he could be reached. Horrible. We were married, shared a wife and a station. Now he’s dead. I’m sorry he’s dead.
Universe 2 - [Anthology] Page 16
