Thumbprints

by Pamela Sargent

  He was silent for a while. The horses near us had not moved, and I could hear nothing behind us.

  “What happened?” I said at last. “How did you come to ride in the sky?”

  “It was on a night like this. A circle of light shone down from Heaven, a circle so wide that it covered our camp. A few of my people were frightened, but I felt no fear. Is it not said that we fly to Heaven when we leave this life? The light was a sign from Heaven, calling us to it.”

  I gazed up at the sky for a moment, almost expecting such a light to appear again.

  “A voice told us to mount our horses,” he continued. “It was a voice no man with courage could disobey. Some people fled from our camp then, but most of us were quickly in our saddles. The light lifted us and our steeds, and as we rose, the world shrank until it was no more than one jewel among many set in the tent of Heaven. The trails we follow now are made of stars, and we ride along them as easily as we once did upon this grass. Heaven’s campfires warm us, and we feed upon the warmth of suns.” He lifted his head. “We are greater than we once were, and the Earth is even smaller than when we left her.”

  I was trying to absorb what he had told me, to make sense of it somehow. Something, long ago, had found this man and his people and taken them from their home here. I imagined strange beings, maybe the representatives of an advanced civilization, coming to Earth and carrying those Mongols away – to what? Were they now giants who roamed the sky, shrinking to their former size when nostalgia brought them to the surface of their old world? Was their size and scale something they could change at will, and was time something else they controlled easily? This man, whatever his powers, seemed to come from an earlier age, one in which the only proper role for a man was that of warrior and signs from Heaven were part of the natural order. I wondered how many centuries had passed since his departure and transformation.

  “And you have come back,” I murmured, “because you want to see your old world?”

  “I have come back before, out of longing, as have many of my comrades. Before, only one might come, or two together, to ride the lands they once knew. A man looking up might see no more than the misty form of a horse among the clouds. But Earth has grown even smaller since our time. More of us have come to gaze down upon the world that no longer has space for the wanderer and his herds.”

  The night air was suddenly colder around me, my back stiff with tension. The Mongol’s face seemed to glow more brightly, as if a fire were lighting him from within.

  I said, “Why are you here?”

  He seemed to ignore my question as he said, “To put a man behind walls, to pen him up, to limit him to one small patch of grass, is to take away all that he is.” He was on his feet in one swift movement. “Mount your horses!” he called out, and another voice seemed to echo his.

  I abruptly found myself upon one of the white horses, with no recollection of having mounted the animal. I had no reins and no saddle, but had to cling to the horse’s mane and dig my heels into its flanks.

  Bayan was on the back of another steed. The horseman was quickly astride his mount, and then the plain was shrinking below us as we rode the wind. How small it was after all, that world I had roamed aimlessly, as though I might find some purpose for myself once I had encompassed it. Now I willed myself to leave it behind, to become something more, and my horse became the steed of my will, lifting me effortlessly. I looked away from that tiny blue pearl and followed the Mongol out across the plain of stars.

  My horse’s hooves thundered across the starry ground. The horseman was leading Bayan and me over a vast steppe of light, yet I felt a wind against my face and thought I saw painfully bright blades of grass sprouting from the plain. It was as though the landscape I had left behind were somehow superimposed upon what I was seeing now, as if my mind was trying to make what I saw comprehensible to me. I was still myself, but grown immense. I could reach for one of the globes that hung in the blackness above me like ripe fruit and find myself holding a world in my hand.

  More riders were ahead of us. I kept near Bayan and the horseman leading us, and then suddenly I was among the mass of riders, surrounded by men and women on horseback who seemed to change even as I gazed at them. Their faces glowed, growing brighter; their tunics and robes were adorned with nebulae. I could feel their transformation working inside me, my heart beating as the nourishing plasma of suns flowed through me.

  I was a giant among the stars, able to roam through an infinite territory. Joy filled me as I realized that this journey would never have to end. A rider near me laughed, and the celestial ground shook with his laughter and mine. There were more ahead, stellar realms beyond this one, spaces to wander before memory and sentiment tugged at me again.

  But there was also a longing inside me for what I had been, perhaps the same longing the horseman riding with me must have felt. I remembered my world, and felt fear. What was I becoming? What was it that had taken me and brought me here? I could not accept this; it could not be real.

  My horse slid to a halt and reared, nearly throwing me from its back, and then we were falling as the plain of light spun around us. Clinging to my horse, I felt my will failing, my body shrinking into itself once more.

  Earth swelled below me until I was caught by its clouds. I imagined myself shrinking into oblivion, becoming no more than a bit of dust, and my terror blotted out all thought. I cried out and found myself lying on grassy ground.

  My head throbbed. I got unsteadily to my feet. A few paces away, the horse I had ridden stood amid other white horses. I was near the yurt. The old couple and the three soldiers stood outside, staring past me.

  I turned around slowly, and saw the horseman who had come for me, reduced once again to my size. He lifted his hand in what seemed to be a greeting. Bayan was nowhere in sight.

  I was moving toward the horses when a wide shaft of light shot down from the heavens, illuminating the plain. In the distance, others were outside their yurts, gazing up at the sky. A few people on horseback or on foot were fleeing into the darkness beyond the bright circle, but more were running toward the light.

  “Mount your horses!” The words were coming from the horseman who had guided me, but another, more resonant voice underlay his, a voice that echoed across the plain while speaking words I did not know.

  The three soldiers went to the horses, followed by the old man and woman. The young men were quickly on their mounts; the old couple leaped upon theirs nimbly. All of them were smiling, their faces shining with light.

  They grew into the sky, the hooves of their horses treading an invisible trail, and others caught in the circle of light followed them. A white light shone around all the riders and their horses as they receded from me. I watched them as they climbed the wind, until I lost them among the distant throng of titans storming the stars.

  The plain was dark once more. A feeling of loss and despair overwhelmed me; I might have become one of them, and been riding among them. I was small enough for this world now, with only the memory of having been something greater. I gazed after the riders, watching them grow apparently smaller as they rushed toward Orion, becoming a glowing cloud, then a pinprick of light before winking out, leaving only the familiar constellations; and I realized that even with their mastery of scale, which gave them the power of seven-league boots, they could not overwhelm the interstellar deep. I suspected that even if they could do so, they would not; this was the way they wished things to be.

  I did not belong among the horsemen. They had not come here for people like me, but for those our world had pushed aside. I wondered how many other riders had been drawn to a new life that night, what other forgotten people might have been carried away into the sky. The horsemen were gone, but I felt they would return, that this world would see them again when it was time for other nomads cast aside by history to join them.

  The scarf the horseman had given me was still around my neck. I clutched at its soft woolen cloth, holding on to it wit
h one hand as I walked toward the yurt.

  Many of the Mongolians assembled on the plain had been left behind. At dawn, I climbed into the jeep and drove slowly along the ruts in the ground. The jeep ran out of gas near a group of yurts; a man was there, siphoning gasoline from an abandoned jeep to fill his small truck. He spoke no English, but understood that I wanted to return to Ulan Bator. I got back to my hotel in time to board a bus carrying tourists to the airport. From an Australian on the bus, I heard that people in other parts of the world – Bedouins, ethnic Cossacks, a few people in the countryside of France, a group of Indians in Nebraska – had been seen riding into the sky.

  The riders have not appeared since then, but I find myself wondering if they will.

  Somewhere among the stars there were intelligences capable of reaching into the heart of a people and giving them what they most desired. They had come to the Earth and found a joyous inner treasure among the Mongols, a graceful willfulness that had lost the means to fulfill itself, and they had given that strength what it needed. People I had seen as poor and passive had still possessed a spirit that those intelligences valued.

  For me there would be no bright stars, because my heart was not bigger than the Earth, I told myself bravely, almost believing that I was home where I belonged as I tried to accept the bars of my prison.

  Originals

  Lora dipped her spoon into the soup, then lifted it to her lips. The broth was clear, with a faint lemony taste; the vegetables, as always, were slightly crispy. Bits of parsley floated on top of the soup. Lora swallowed.

  “Superb,” she said, trying to smile. Antoine, the chef, stood near the table, searching her face with his morose brown eyes. “Really, it’s delicious. You are an artist, Antoine.” Antoine tilted his head; his chef’s hat slipped a little.

  Geraldo, Lora’s partner, was slurping softly. “Good soup,” he said. The rest of Lora’s family was gazing at her expectantly, perhaps wondering why she had not been more effusive in her praise. Her three sons put down their spoons almost at the same moment, while her two little girls fidgeted, tugging at their gown straps. At the other end of the table, Junia was staring directly at Lora.

  “I think it’s one of the finest soups I’ve ever tasted,” Junia announced. Antoine bowed.

  Lora could not control herself any longer. Releasing a sigh, she dropped her spoon next to her bowl. “Oh,” she murmured, giving the word all the misery she could muster. She covered her eyes for a moment. “You’ll all find out soon enough.” She leaned back in her chair. “Another disk was stolen, it seems. It was the one for this cauliflower soup.”

  “That is too much,” her son Roald muttered as his brothers, Rex and Richard, nodded their heads. “I don’t understand it. It just goes on and on.” The three brothers scowled in unison. Rina tugged at her strap again, then brushed back a lock of blond hair; her sister, Celia, planted her elbows on the table. One of Celia’s loose, dark tresses narrowly missed her bowl of soup. Junia sat back, folding her hands. Geraldo continued to eat.

  “A pity,” Antoine said in tragic tones.

  “It’s unbearable,” Lora said in an unusually harsh voice. “I imagine that, at this very moment, millions of people are enjoying this same soup. What is the point of having our own chef and our own exclusive recipe disks if we can’t keep them to ourselves and our invited guests?”

  “I am most sorry, madame,” Antoine said, gazing heavenward. “I shall create another soup, never fear. And there are still all the disks that remain. They far outnumber the purloined ones.”

  Lora glanced at him, suddenly irritated with his unhappy face. Gretchen Karell’s chef was a cheerful Chinese gentleman who could barely contain his joy at the sight of his sumptuous dishes, while Antoine’s seemed to bring him to the verge of tears. It was Gretchen who had left the message that morning, telling Lora that various food fanciers had suddenly acquired disks labeled Antoine Laval’s Cauliflower Soup. Lora had longed to reach toward the screen and slap Gretchen’s smug image.

  “Still tastes good,” Geraldo said as he finished.

  “Really!” Lora gazed balefully at her partner’s handsome but chubby face. “I simply can’t understand how you can so blithely enjoy a soup that anyone can have now. I’ve always prided myself on our unique cuisine, and now it seems that it’s becoming as common as dirt.”

  “I don’t know how the disk could have been stolen,” Junia said in her clear, sharp voice. “No one’s been in this house except us for at least a month, and the house would have warned us of any intrusion. You always had guests here when the others were taken.”

  Lora winced. She had done her best to get along with Junia, who was soon to be the partner of her son Roald, but the young woman was tactless. Junia had just pointed out what no one else at the table had wanted to mention – namely, that one of those present had to be the thief. That was the worst of it; Lora would have to be suspicious of her own family. Already, she was peering at each face, searching for signs of guilt, wondering who would be capable of such a deed. Her three sons stared back with the same bland look in their identical blue eyes. Her two daughters were once again plucking at their gowns and she nearly burst out with a reprimand, wanting to tell them to be still.

  Geraldo signaled to Antoine, who departed for the kitchen to prepare the next course. Geraldo could not have stolen the disk. He had a hearty appetite, but at the same time, he didn’t seem to care what he ate; it was one of his more disagreeable qualities. Lora tensed. Maybe that indifference made him more likely to steal. The treasured recipes did not mean that much to him, and he would enjoy them just as much no matter how many people had access to them. He was, she thought sadly, only a man of leisure at heart.

  Lora covered her eyes again, waiting for someone to take pity and blurt out a confession. She would forgive the lapse, she decided, but only after a truly abject apology. But when she looked up, the robots were already clearing away the soup bowls in preparation for the next course, and no one had spoken.

  “I’d like to speak to you,” Lora said to the screen in her room. “Alone, please.”

  “Certainly,” the house replied. An image formed on the screen; a kindly, gray-bearded man was now staring out at her, a personification of the mind that ran the house. Lora had always been uneasy whenever she spoke to the disembodied voice of her house cybermind and preferred the friendly, human image.

  “We are now on a closed channel,” the house said as the man’s lips moved. “Please do go on.”

  “Who stole that disk?”

  “You know I can’t answer that. If I had known, I would have informed you of the fact.”

  “I thought you might have some ideas.”

  “I am completely in the dark.” The house chuckled at that; it was night outside. “I don’t watch the kitchen, you know.”

  “Show me the kitchen.”

  The man disappeared. She was now gazing at the kitchen, knowing that Antoine, who hated to be observed at work, was asleep in his bedroom.

  The room looked like any well-equipped kitchen. Inside one pantry shelf, thousands of disks were concealed behind the polished wood doors. Each disk, when inserted into the kitchen’s duplicator, would produce meat, fish, poultry, fresh fruits, vegetables, or other raw materials for Antoine to use in preparing a dish. Another shelf held disks with the patterns for wine and other beverages, and a third held spice and herb disks. There were cheese disks, cooking oil disks, butter disks. But in one corner, inside one special shelf, were Antoine’s own recipe disks, each containing the pattern for one of his creations.

  The duplicator itself, a tall, transparent column with metallic shelves jutting out from its sides, stood near one wall next to a disposal chute. Inside the chute, carried to it from other passages throughout the house’s walls, sat much of the household’s cast-off clothing, worn-out artifacts, garbage, trash, and dust – all of the materials needed for transmutation. When a disk was inserted into one of the duplicator’s slots
, the chute would drop the necessary amount of debris into the column. The duplicator would glow as energy created by fusion poured into it and the debris, broken down into its constituent atoms, would be transformed, becoming a bottle of wine, a roasted chicken, or some other food, depending on the pattern stored on the disk. One could also imprint a pattern on a blank disk by slipping the small round platter into a slot above the shelf holding the object one intended to store.

  Lora had only a rudimentary understanding of how the duplicator worked, but she had learned a smattering of history and knew that commonplace objects had once been rare. The duplicator, given enough material and the endless stream of fusion energy, could change that material into anything the user wanted, as long as a pattern for that object was on a disk. Sometimes, in her more reflective moments, Lora’s heart would go out to those who in past times had had to endure scanty supplies or even do without the bare necessities. There were no shortages now. She drew her brows together. That wasn’t quite true. She had occasionally run out of detritus and had been forced to send the robots out foraging for dead leaves and twigs. Once, during a particularly festive party, she had even resorted to having the robots feed dirt from her flower garden into the duplicator in order to feed all the guests. There was, of course, always human waste, but Lora would never dream of using that in the kitchen duplicator. Such material was collected in another chute, to be sterilized and then transmuted by the duplicator in her sitting room into other things. One had to have some standards. Recycling was a wonderful and necessary thing, but there were limits.

  Occasionally, Antoine had allowed Lora to enter the kitchen while he was cooking, a rare privilege and one that she was careful not to abuse. The last time she had been there, her chef had been trying out a recipe for poulet persillade. He had assembled his ingredients and had finished cooking the chicken dish for the fourth time; the first three attempts had not met with his approval and had been relegated to the chute.