Tedesco was right behind him. “They won't follow,” the mutant gasped, leaning back against a sunburst of blues and greens, made larger than life by the colorful backdrop.
It was then that Jask realized he had entered the Chen Valley Blight, the Wildlands, where the Ruiner reigned supreme. In his panic he had forgotten all about suicide. He had even lost his knife.
11
The Watcher stirs restlessly, though its slumber is profound.
Temporarily withdrawn from thought of any kind, it feeds mindlessly on the web of forces that contains it, replenishes energies of the soul that have been wasted by years of waiting, centuries of anticipation…
In time, it will wake.
It must.
Perhaps its sleep will end naturally, at the time it has planned to arise from its bed.
Or perhaps it will be stirred to consciousness by a strengthening of sympathetic psionic resonances that have just now pricked it for the first time.
The Watcher is meant to watch and wait.
Even a Watcher, however, must sometimes rest.
It stirs, sighs, subsides, feeds and continues its long nap…
12
The whites of Tedesco's eyes were green, and the wrinkled black flesh of his face, shiny with sweat, gleamed at many points with salty emerald droplets. He led Jask into a large, jewel-walled, jewel-floored chamber that was fully forty meters in diameter, though the ceiling lay just a meter overhead. In the center of the room he shucked off his rucksack and let it fall. The whumpf of its impact on the glittering floor echoed in that place like the beat of distant wings.
Jask dropped his own gray sack of supplies and sat down. His thin legs were too weak to support him much longer; if Tedesco had wished to go on even another hundred yards, the Pure would have been forced to stay behind. He was trembling all over, uncontrollably, like a man with the ague, though his symptoms represented only fear and exhaustion.
Tedesco sat down, too, generating more winglike reverberations, which the two of them listened to for a time, until the silence was again complete and until they had recovered their breath.
“We'll spend the night here,” the bruin said. He indicated the sea-colored walls and said, “Deep in the formation, where it's all greens and blues like this, the lights are the least bothersome at night.”
“You've been here before?” Jask inquired, staring at the glassy walls around them. They had come through areas of yellow and orange, of red and violet and finally into these cool vaults.
“Not in this particular room,'' Tedesco explained. “But I've explored several other branches of the structure. I've been fascinated by it since I was just a child.”
Jask was intrigued by what was, to him, a twofold revelation: first, that anyone would find the Wildlands “fascinating” rather than terrifying; secondly, that Tedesco had ever been a child. He knew, of course, that the bruin had not sprung fully grown from his mother's loins. Still, to imagine Tedesco playing with toys and toddling around like a human child…
Tedesco sighed, as if he had been listening in on Jask's thoughts and had to agree that childhood now seemed an impossibility, and he said, “When my esp powers began to bloom, I realized that my life might depend on my familiarity with the Wildlands. And now it seems that I was quite correct.”
Jask looked at the two prewar rifles lying beside the mutant, cold and black and deadly, and he said, “How many of them did you kill?”
“A couple,” Tedesco said vaguely.
Jask looked down at his own hands folded in his lap, and he tried to sort out how he felt about these murders. If Tedesco had not returned the soldiers' fire, neither of them would have reached the entrance to the jeweled bacteria. Yet, Tedesco was a mutant, and his victims were Pures. It was clear where Jask's sympathies should lie.
“Is it clear?” Tedesco asked quietly.
Jask looked up, confused, unable to answer.
The bruin turned to his rucksack and began to open various compartments. “Let's have something to eat,” he said, toneless and remote.
They consumed three lengths of dried, salted meat (Jask could choke down only half a stick; Tedesco happily finished the rest), five pieces of fresh fruit (Jask being satisfied with two, Tedesco with three), half a loaf of hard brown bread (Jask spat out his first bite, disgusted by the texture and taste and aware, for the first time, that he was eating tainted food fit only for mutants; the bruin munched happily on the remainder), and a quantity of water from the long wooden flask in Tedesco's pack. They spoke only occasionally as they ate, reserving most of their comments for the food or for the shifting, rippling colors that glowed brilliantly in the walls.
When they were done, Tedesco said, “I promised you a discussion.”
Jask looked blank for a moment.
“On the virtues of our individual notions of this world's history,” the mutant explained.
“Mine is not a notion,” Jask said.
“Oh?”
“We'll see.”
“Yes, we will,” Jask said, though he had already begun to wonder if the bruin's version — whatever it was — might not be more sound than his own. According to Pure philosophy, he was now in the realm of the Ruiner, who should have sought him out instantly and destroyed him. Yet he lived. As far as he could see, he was not even changing physically. Unless the Ruiner were modifying him slowly, inwardly… The idea repelled him and caused him to draw into himself, hugging himself like a child in the womb.
The husky mutant leaned back against his rucksack, as if the lumpy bag were a pillow. He used the long, hard claw at the tip of his stubby but humanlike thumb to pick at his jagged teeth. He said, “Let's hear your story first, my friend. How do you explain the world in which we find ourselves?”
Jask thought a moment, brushed nervously as his hair, cleared his throat and spoke carefully, wanting to get this all right. His religion was not one that evangelized, because its requirements for membership were biologically stringent. Yet, he felt, on some fundamental spiritual basis it was important to make this tainted creature understand the infinite wisdom inherent in the doctrine and dogma of the Pure church. As concisely and as dramatically as he could, his tone becoming more confident as he continued, he told what his kind believed…
Many thousands of generations ago, there had been no mutants in the world, for all of mankind lived in harmony with Lady Nature. These Pures established a civilization of conquest and discovery, the mysterious remains of which are to be seen to this day in the many ruins and in the still-functioning fortresses where the Pures maintain a vigil against the Ruiner. Lady Nature set no limits on her creatures, but offered them even the stars if they proved themselves capable of accepting and using the gift.
“And what happened to bring about this crumbling Earth we now inhabit?” Tedesco asked.
There was a note of sarcasm in his voice but also, Jask thought, not just a little genuine interest.
As a temptation, to test the mettle of Her creations, Lady Nature permitted mankind the knowledge of the Genetic Mystery, allowed him to learn how life could be created without Her, how species could be altered and how man himself might change his appearance so that he could fly or live beneath the waters like fish. She fully expected them to reject the application of this knowledge, expected them to proclaim their love for Her and to refuse to accept the role of gods in Her place. Instead mankind went against Her will, created whole new races, sometimes for experimental purposes and other times for little more than a lark, for decoration in a society they felt had come to lack ethnic differences and individualism. Once they had disregarded Lady Nature's prime right of creation, they had opened this sector of the universe to the influence of the Ruiner, another cosmic force working in opposition to Lady Nature, once Her mate and now Her enemy, a creature of evil and hatred and jealousy. With the Ruiner corrupting men's minds and souls, the laws of Nature were more and more discounted until at last Lady Nature and the Ruiner engaged in direct, mo
rtal combat, battling back and forth across the face of the Earth, warring for the possession of human souls.
Tedesco laughed. Or perhaps he coughed. Jask could not be sure, for the bruin's face was blank when he looked up.
“Go on,” Tedesco said.
“At last,” Jask said, “the world was little more than ruin, with most of mankind destroyed or tainted. Lady Nature, disappointed in us, left behind only a residual piece of Her power to watch over us as. She fled to another part of the universe to begin new work. The Ruiner, having stalemated Her, pleased with that and eager to locate Her and do damage to Her new work, also left behind a fragment of himself in order to maintain the balance of power established here between him and Lady Nature. We've been struggling, in the thousands of years since, to maintain Lady Nature's original creations and to enlarge our enclave populations so that, in time, She may find us worthy, once more, of Her close attention.”
Tedesco stared at a scintillating splotch of chartreuse that vaguely resembled a dragon's head and played in the wall behind Jask. He said, “But your enclave populations are declining.”
“Only temporarily.”
“Constantly,” he disagreed.
Jask was plainly dejected, his head held low between his frail shoulders, his body a mass of sharp angles as his bones pressed against his thin padding of flesh like struts against a tent skin. He said, “Perhaps we simply aren't worthy of Her renewed interest.”
“And perhaps she doesn't even care,” Tedesco said.
“She must care!” Jask snapped. But his emotional response was only momentary; he subsided into apathy again, staring at his knees. “It isn't for Her to care — not until we've erased our past sins and have proven that we are proper receptacles for Her grace.”
Tedesco considered all of this for a moment, looked away from the green walls and studied the diminutive Pure. “I don't believe in any god or goddess,'' he said, his voice low and gruff. “But if I did, I don't suppose I could fancy one that was as fickle as yours.”
Jask said, “I didn't expect you to believe it.”
“Why? Because I'm — tainted?”
“Yes.”
“So are you.”
“But I wasn't always this way.”
“That hardly matters,” Tedesco said. He smiled slightly and added, “So far as I can see, Lady Nature is an unforgiving bitch goddess. You'll be on the outs with that one until the last day of your life — and perhaps even after that.”
Jask said nothing.
“Will you listen to my story now? It's much easier to swallow than yours, much more detailed than yours without all these vaguely defined gods and their cosmic brawls.”
Defensively Jask said, “No one can understand Lady Nature or the Ruiner well enough to define them crisply. Could a nonsentient forest animal define you or me? Surely you can understand that the higher life form of Lady Nature and the Ruiner is all but incomprehensible to us lesser creatures.”
Tedesco sighed and said, “Will you listen? And will you think about what I tell you?”
“It will all be lies,” Jask said.
“Do you honestly think I would deceive you?”
“Not purposefully.”
Tedesco grinned. “Ah, then you believe me deceived myself, or even mad.”
“Or both,” Jask said ruefully. “But I'll listen.”
Tedesco sat straight up, leaning away from his rucksack. “First of all, there is no Lady Nature or Ruiner. Never was. Never will be.”
Jask said nothing, but he was clearly disbelieving.
Tedesco said, “Approximately a hundred thousand years ago, men first learned how to build machines that would fly. They had accomplished much before this time, though the deeds of those eras are utterly lost to us now. The cataclysms in between have erased so much of the old records. Actually preflight eras don't interest us much, for it was with the development of the flying machines that mankind bloomed like a flower. In less than a century they had graduated from flights within their own atmosphere to trips to the moon and the establishment of colonies on several other nearby worlds.”
“Man has never left this world,” Jask said. “The stars are denied him, because he has never earned them.”
“I'm not talking about the stars right now,” Tedesco said. “Just the planets, at first. I know that you don't understand me, but that is only because the knowledge of other worlds has long been forgotten. You see, besides the stars, there are nearer heavenly bodies, as large as our own, not like the moon, hanging out there waiting for us.”
“I've never seen them,” Jask said.
“You can't see them that easily,” Tedesco said. “They are not so far away as the stars, but far enough to appear only as tiny spots of color in the night sky.”
“Then they are stars,” Jask said.
Frustrated with his own inability to explain and with Jask's narrowmindedness, Tedesco thumped his fist on the blue floor. “Planets, like this one. Like the planets that circle each of those stars you see at night.”
“But you're asking me to take all of this incredible stuff on faith,” Jask complained.
“If you can take Lady Nature on faith, you can listen to what I'm telling you.”
“Lady Nature is different,” Jask insisted.
“I'll agree to that,” Tedesco said, grinning.
“Oh, go on,” Jask said. He shifted his position, for his poor shell of flesh did little to cushion his bones from the jeweled floor.
Tedesco said, “Men settled on the other planets circling our sun, fought impossible environmental problems there and won. In time, perhaps a thousand years after they touched down on the moon, they launched the first starship. A thousand years after that, they had uncovered the key to faster-than-light travel and began the greatest era in the history of the race. They went to the stars.”
“Impossible. If we had achieved so much, Lady Nature never would have left us to—”
Tedesco interrupted with a wave of his hand and continued when Jask grew quiet. “For perhaps five thousand years, mankind journeyed in the stars. The number of other worlds is infinite, you know. The possibilities for discovery never ceased. Indeed, in all that time mankind encountered no other sentient race, only the ruins of what other races had achieved and lost in ways we will never know. But after five thousand years, men discovered alien races superior to our own. It was this encounter that led to the decline of their civilization.”
Jask said, “How could that be? Space and stars are blessings, not evils.”
“Man found that he could not communicate with the alien races that he met, for they were purely telepathic beings who had eons earlier stopped communicating verbally. An entire galactic civilization, composed of hundreds of odd races of beings, did business by means of telepathy. Some of them could read the minds of men, but none of them could make themselves understood, for man was not the least bit receptive to their mental emanations. Earthborn were outcasts, both intellectually and socially. Perhaps they could have ignored these superior beings and gone on, exploring arms of the universe in which the other races had never ventured or had no interest. But they did not. Man was precocious in some ways, venturing into space before most other races did, quick and bright and eager to learn. On the other hand, he was hundreds of generations away from acceptance by his superiors. For this reason, and for the psychic shock his inferiority caused him, man retreated from the stars, came home to his own system of worlds, finally withdrew back to Mother Earth herself, there to contemplate his position on the scale of things.
“In time his inability to accept his station in the cosmic order corrupted him, turned him away from real achievement. For thousands of years mankind reveled, trying to forget that he occupied a low rung on the ladder of sentient civilizations. He partied. He made new toys, among which were the Artificial Wombs. At first some held hopes that these centers for genetic juggling would produce telepathic men, but this was not to be. In a few years the Artifici
al Wombs were just other toys, to be played with by parents who wanted colorful children either for the thrill of it or for some strange social status I've never been able to define.
“In time their society divided into countless cults and sects, splintered by philosophies and religions, by occupations and leisure interests, by politics and morals, they began to lose interest in the games and other festivities. Men fell to arguing with other men. These arguments became fistfights. The fist-fights degenerated into armed confrontations, and then into genuine battles and, at last, into major wars among differing power blocks. For a brief while the catalogue of human knowledge was added to — as men theorized, built and used strange new weapons. But this was only a cancerous growth of knowledge, and it led to the Last War, nearly killing the entire human organism. This occurred seventy-five thousand years ago. In the time since, mankind and all his mutated selves struggled for survival against staggering odds, often nearly lost, somehow went on and grew, lost ground, gained ground, and obtained the present Medieval level.”
Jask shook his head. “There are a great many gaps in your story.”
“Such as?”
“How do you explain the fortresses where the Pure enclaves live? Were they not Lady Nature's gifts to the survivors of Her war with the Ruiner, Her offering of a last chance for mankind to remain pure and gain Her grace again?”
“They were nothing of the sort,” Tedesco said. “They were simply the last refuge of mankind when the final war had devastated the Earth. They were originally built to house high government officials who remained safe while most of the populace was ashed and plagued with diseases.”
“What of these jeweled formations?” Jask inquired.
“What of them?”
The Pure stood and stretched the knotted muscles in his legs, rubbed at his sore buttocks with both hands. “Can you deny, in good conscience, that they are monuments to the Ruiner and that they were established by the first men who openly worshiped a false god?”
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