The Beginning of Sorrows

by Gilbert, Morris

  It was a neutral place with no decoration, except each wall, aside from the one with the inevitable Cyclops screen, was completely filled with photographs of animals, all taken by Zoan himself. Dr. Kesteven had given him a camera two years earlier, and now the walls were covered with pictures of the wildlife of the desert. Hawks and vultures and blue jays caught by the telephoto lens crowded one wall. Another was adorned with enlargements he had made of the jaguar, a puma, an elk, a ten-point buck, and a red wolf. There were whimsical pictures of baby gophers and quick lizards and scuttling spiders, each photo capturing their movements of life.

  Zoan painstakingly touched a combination of keys on the Cyclops wall pad, the only control command he had ever bothered to learn. The screen stayed dark, but the gentle strains of Debussy wandered into the small room. Stretching out on the cot and locking his fingers behind his head, for a long time Zoan lay still, listening to the music, lulled. He loved music of almost every kind, and once he heard a song he never forgot the tune or the words. His head was cluttered with music, though he rarely called any one song or score to the forefront.

  He lay for four hours, sleeping dreamlessly. When he awoke he was hungry, so he went to the kitchen. The evening meal was over, and he cleaned up the mess that the kitchen workers always left for Zoan to clean up. Everything was quiet, and the lab seemed deserted, though Zoan knew, of course, that there were twenty-six people on the Red Level right now. Sitting down at the worktable, he ate a bowl of cereal and drank two large glasses of the fresh milk that he had brought in. Zoan always ate whatever was available and never complained.

  Finally he left the kitchen and began to roam the Red Level. He had spent his life here; there were no surprises, and there was nothing for him to see. Once he had asked Dr. Kesteven to let him sleep outside, but after he received a negative answer, it never occurred to Zoan to ask again. Now he moved silently through the corridors, his mind longingly centered on the world so far above him.

  He decided to go see if maybe Dr. Kesteven was working late. Sometimes—not every time, but sometimes—Dr. Kesteven would let him stay in the lab while he worked. A dull sense of loneliness filled Zoan, and he hoped that maybe tonight he would get to stay in Dr. Kesteven’s lab. Aside from the animals and music, his only pleasure in life was being with Niklas Kesteven. He stopped at Dr. Kesteven’s lab door, said “Zoan,” and he was glad to see the door rise on the air hydraulics to let him in.

  But the lab was dark, with only the harsh halogen light over Dr. Kesteven’s worktable still on. Disappointed, Zoan moved to the table and switched it off. But the door—a regular wooden door—into Dr. Kesteven’s private quarters was ajar, and voices came through it. Automatically Zoan stopped to listen, for he had no sense, no instinct, to tell him not to eavesdrop.

  It was two voices, and Zoan identified the second voice with bitter disappointment. The woman was with the doctor, and that meant there was no chance that Dr. Kesteven would talk to him, or let him visit. Zoan’s hearing was almost as acute as his sight and he remained still in the deserted lab, listening. Maybe the woman would leave soon.

  “. . . Thiobacillus chaco,” Dr. Kesteven was saying, “is a chemosynthetic bacterium that utilizes energy from the earth itself—minerals—rather than the sun-based photosynthesis process for food.”

  “As usual, Niklas, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Alia, I want you to try to understand, as difficult as it may be for you. I wish you had an inkling of any scientific theory.” Niklas’s voice was rather thick, his arrogance barely concealed, but then he grinned widely and softened. “This organism is going to be very important in my life, Alia, and it would be good if you could share it with me. I believe I can put it so that you will understand it.”

  Alia, dressed in a flowing one-piece lounging robe, was seated across from Dr. Kesteven, curled up in a black leather armchair. He was sprawled on the sofa opposite her, across a sterile expanse of glass and steel table. Both were drinking amber-colored brandy out of thick cut-glass goblets. Alia knew that when Niklas drank he eventually relaxed and grew more expansive. This was what Alia wanted: for him to soften, and for him to talk to her.

  “You’ve been working on this thing for two years now, Niklas,” she said, cocking her head to the side, her eyes sparkling. “Ever since I came and fetched you from the middle of nowhere in the Caucasus Mountains. I took a big risk for you, you know. That was hardly within the United States’ jurisdiction, to steal a big scientific discovery. Aside from the fact that I really didn’t have the authority to send a Vindicator and crew to personally pick you up.”

  “When I got back and the Third Directorate understood what I’d found, they approved. You didn’t get reprimanded, did you?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, you were promoted soon, weren’t you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to try to tell me that the reason I got promoted to third commissar of the Shortgrass Steppe Biome was because of you and that silly bug. That’s not true and you know it, Niklas. I got promoted because of my dedication and success as a field coordinator.”

  Kesteven shrugged carelessly. “Two days after you picked me up, an eleven-man squad went in. They took more samples but no one, not even those men, knew exactly what I had found.”

  “So what was it?”

  Kesteven’s dark eyes wandered to a point somewhere over Alia’s left shoulder and stayed unfocused, dreamy. “You’ll have to take it by faith, Alia . . . but then, a lot of science has to be approached, at least in the beginning . . . by a leap of faith.” He roused, then took an appreciative sip from the fine old goblet. “It was something like Saint Elmo’s fire, I thought at first, which is a purely inanimate electrical reaction. Then, when I could see that it was a sort of meaningful pattern, I thought it was something like fireflies, or some of the marine crustaceans that produce phosphorescence. After a long, hard study, I did find that it was animate, a chemoautotroph. Sulfur crystals were found in its cells, which means that the bacteria feed on sulfur, then oxidize it into energy. But that didn’t explain the light phenomenon.”

  He paused for a while, brooding. Alia waited, barely touching her drink. At length, Niklas said in a voice curiously reserved for him, “Thiobacillus chaco, which I think we can assume had been in the refined atmosphere of the sealed cave for an unknowable time, took a static charge from the air we introduced. But instead of frying it—as it would have any other organism without chaco’s peculiar qualities—it actually converted the extra electrons into light. Not heat, like other organisms attempt to do with an electrical charge. Into light. It’s—unheard of.”

  “Why is that so important?” Alia asked quietly. She refilled his glass and waited until he drank half of it down.

  “Alia, no living thing has ever been cataloged that produces an electrochemical reaction. Until Thiobacillus chaco, no one ever considered that it might be possible for a living organism to utilize a positive electrical charge in such a way.”

  She stared at him, understanding the concept but unsure of the ramifications. For once, he was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t notice her confusion.

  “I named it chaco,” he said dreamily. “That’s an old Spanish-Indian word for ‘the children of light.’ Millions and millions of them join together, end to end, and they form light strings. In quantity they have a way of dealing with the electrical charge. The charge sweeps through the chain of linked bacteria, creating the coronal discharge—the blue-green light effect. They become airborne, through a mechanism I still haven’t been able to quantify. Once any one of them touches the earth, the circle separates, neutralized. In effect they break the circuit. The charge dissipates into the earth so it’s grounded.”

  Niklas was half-drunk now, and eyed her blearily. “You don’t understand what it means, do you?”

  “Not—not really. I mean, I understand the basics of what you’re saying, Niklas, but I’m just not certain I understand the i
mplications.”

  A touch of contempt returned, but he continued intently, “Here, my dear woman, is a living organism that could live through what was, in proportion, a killing electrical charge. It’s like a child surviving a direct hit by lightning—and here’s the really important thing, the really life-changing, world-changing thing. Chaco doesn’t just live through it.” He shook his head in wonderment and his liquor-dulled eyes grew bright. “It actually controls electricity through biochemical processes.” He took another sip, more cautiously now, and went on, “I didn’t realize the immense significance at first, and I had to do a lot of research in other fields, like physics and electrochemistry and even electrical engineering. But now, finally, I’m certain.”

  Outside, in the lab, Zoan was in a somnambulant state. All the words of the two inside came to him clearly and he would be able to repeat the conversation word-for-word in the future. The words themselves meant nothing to him, the concepts as unreachable as if they had been speaking in Greek. But something about the tone of Niklas’s voice frightened Zoan. It was exactly the same apprehension that had come to him earlier on the surface, when the jaguar was stalking, though Zoan didn’t know yet what the Wrong was, what the Bad Thing was that was about to happen. Now he got the same sense, as he listened to Dr. Kesteven talking loudly and with a slight slurring of his words. Zoan kept thinking, Something is Wrong. Some Bad Thing here . . .

  Zoan had been frightened of many things, but never of Dr. Niklas Kesteven, and Zoan wasn’t even certain now whether his fear was of Dr. Kesteven, or of his incomprehensible words, or of the woman, or just something carried in the air itself. But he did know he was afraid; his tanned skin dimpled with goose bumps. Numbly, Zoan left the lab, skimming back to his own cubicle for comfort and security. The lab door closed soundlessly behind him. Niklas and Alia never knew that their conversation had been overheard.

  Niklas was saying expansively, “Only a few inventions have changed the world, Alia. Gunpowder. The discovery of antibiotics. The digital computer, laser technology. But this is more significant than any of those. Consider this.” He got up, rather unsteadily, and touched the snakelike black lamp with the low light on a table by Alia’s chair. With a quick movement he twisted the neck so the bulb glared full on Alia’s face. She stared up at him unblinkingly, the harsh light making her pupils tiny needle points. Niklas, a little deflated, deflected the lamp slightly and went on in a softer tone, “Did you know that we are using the very same technology for this lamp, and that one, and the overheads, that a man named Thomas Edison invented almost two hundred years ago?”

  “No,” she answered, still defiant, her head thrown back to stare up at him.

  “It’s true. The very same outmoded, old-fashioned way of producing light. The same outmoded, inefficient manner of transporting electricity. The same old, tired wires and conduits and circuits . . . But shortly, very shortly now, Alia, everything will change. The entire world will change. Because of Thiobacillus chaco.” He sat back down, tossed down the last of the drink, and grinned his canine grin at her. “Because of me.”

  Alia Silverthorne moved over and sat down in his lap, leaning against him. The time for talk was over, she knew. “I love a man who has power,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  “No one loves a man with power. They fear him,” Kesteven said thickly. And then he put his drink down and reached for her.

  Zoan could not escape the sense of danger—somewhere, hidden, waiting—that had crept over him as he had overheard the conversation between Kesteven and the woman. He tried to blot it out with work, but that didn’t succeed. For hours he walked through the desert alone, hoping that the companionship of the wild deer, shy and elusive, or the cougars, or even the vultures that circled overhead, might remove, somehow, the words that he had heard. They kept playing over and over again in his head. He had no idea why they made him afraid; they still meant nothing to him.

  For three days he did not speak to a soul, but no one noticed, for that was not uncommon for Zoan. As Dr. Kesteven had said, he had no social skills, and unless he planted himself directly in front of someone and addressed them, they rarely even knew he was there. He was burdened by a heavy weight—and there was not one living soul he could share it with.

  Finally, on the fourth night after overhearing Niklas and Alia’s conversation, he fell into a deep and profound sleep. He began to hear what he thought was music, but his sleep was so deep he didn’t recognize it as such. Once his mind rose almost to the conscious level, and he thought fuzzily, I’ve left the Cyclops on. But then he dropped back down into that colorless, lightless, odorless place where he stayed when he was not roaming one of his two worlds.

  He knew what a symphony was, for Dr. Kesteven had taught him that. It was a piece of music in several parts. What followed came to him in the movements of a symphony.

  The first movement was like a flute that began on a low-pitched note and rose slowly. There were no words, but as the music continued it became in his mind a message that was felt rather than understood in his conscious, rational faculties: Leave this place . . .

  The message was clear, and although Zoan was in a comalike sleep, he could not mistake it.

  The second movement sounded like a violin. It was a comforting sound, smooth, with the notes rising and falling like liquid over his spirit. Here again there were no words, but clearly as if it were etched in stone, Zoan seemed to see the message. I will show you what you must do . . .

  There was a long silence, a long waiting. Finally Zoan began struggling through the levels of consciousness. As he moved upward toward understanding, fear began to creep in. But before he came to wakefulness, even as doubts started gnawing at the corners of his mind, the third movement arose, and this time it was like a distant trumpet, blowing a solid, clear, golden note. The melody had a triumphant note. It sounded like something Zoan had heard before but couldn’t quite bring to remembrance. He waited, sleeping, knowing that whatever the trumpet was saying would become clear, and it did. It seemed to surround him rather than coming in through his ears or through any of his senses, and the message was unmistakable: Don’t be afraid . . .

  All of this, the music and the message, came to him whole, like a fine piece of embroidery. The dream, the symphony, and the words were delicate and interwoven in an intricate pattern, yet each theme had an identity that could not be confused with the others.

  Zoan came out of sleep instantly. He stood up and waited until the music faded, as if it had traveled a distance away from him. Then he was surrounded and cloaked by the silence. “Leave this place,” he whispered, “—I will show you what you must do—don’t be afraid.” He repeated the words many times, and as he did so, the movements of the symphony echoed deeply in his spirit. Somehow he knew the music would always be there, and joy swept through him.

  More logical minds might have waited and examined the meaning of the dream or the vision but Zoan was not such a being. He knew somehow that what he had heard had more reality than the concrete and steel that formed the circular laboratory. With deliberation, he pulled on his clothes and packed his knapsack until it bulged. Throwing it over his shoulders, he went to the elevator, swallowed, and said, “Zoan.” Once again, he was feeling apprehensive. I’m leaving my home. But then the golden notes of the trumpet sounded again somewhere deep down inside him. Don’t be afraid, and then the violins, I will show you what to do. And finally the flute, Leave this place.

  The lab elevator deposited him at Level One. Not a single commissar looked up or saw Zoan. Two of them were hunched over Cyclops, engrossed in something on the screens. Four others were in an anteroom, and raucous laughter floated out. Zoan went to the last elevator, spoke his passname, and left the Shortgrass Steppe Biome Lab XJ2197.

  A decrescent moon hung low in the sky, and the pale light of the stars was waning. They made a constellate glow that held him for a moment, and then his friend the dingo, with one blue eye and one brown, came to him whining. “H
ello, Dog.” Reaching down, he caressed the rough head, and thought, What about my friends?

  The “friends” that he thought of were not the workers, nor even Dr. Kesteven, but the animals. He waited, thinking, perhaps, another message or word, or maybe just a bit more of the symphony . . . but nothing came. Finally he walked over to the corral and opened it. The mustangs whinnied, breaking the silence of the predawn. One, the grizzled old lead stallion, came and nuzzled against Zoan’s hand. Without a word, Zoan patted the coarse, wiry shoulder. “You want to come, Horse? It’s time to leave this place.”

  Obediently, Horse (which was the only name Zoan had for him) trotted after him, and naturally all the rest of the horses plodded along after him. They had no sooner reached the end of the cultivated yard, stepping out of the gloom of a stand of ironwoods onto the desert sands, when a lithe, shadowy figure appeared.

  “You come too, Cat. We’re leaving here. This is not our home anymore.” He sensed movement above and looked up. Sticking his fingers in his mouth, he whistled and soon he heard the rustle of wings. A magnificent red-tailed hawk descended and lit upon his shoulder. “We’re leaving, Bird,” he said. “It’s time to go now.”

  He moved quickly and surely then, for he had cut the cord that had bound him all his life. Now he moved surely, his odd, darkened eyes on the high mountains. Suddenly hearing a noise overhead, Zoan stared upward. A black dot appeared; in the shadowy morning, before the sun rose, no one else but Zoan could have seen it at all. It was flying low and very fast. They flew over the lab often, and Dr. Kesteven had told him what these were. It came to his mind without effort, and he said aloud, “F16 Tornado. A German plane.”

  They were like birds of ill omen, these planes, with their deadly sleek lines and their mysterious runes. Zoan could clearly see the iron cross in black, outlined in red, that adorned the side of the fuselage. He stood still, watching until the whistling roar had passed and faded into silence.