“Like the moon, or Mercury,” I said.
“Half right,” he said. “They’re wrong about Mercury.” He suddenly became old Gordon, and took my hand in his. “We’re going to fly now. Don’t be afraid.”
“Fly?” Something pressed up under my feet and we rose, slowly at first, and floated out over the precipice. That set my heart to hammering, and I squeezed his hand so hard his knuckles cracked.
“There’s no way you could drop. Relax and enjoy the view.” We stopped rising and moved forward, faster and faster, with no wind or sense of acceleration.
(Gordon was still wearing only his hair, which came down far enough in back for a semblance of modesty. But only in back.)
On the other side of the canyon, the vegetation was sparse and regularly spaced, not in cultivated rows as such, but rather in that each commanded a certain area of ground, larger for the larger clumps and plants. Some seemed to be the size of trees, though it was hard to estimate, not really knowing how high we were. I studied the plants fiercely; it helped me fight the anxiety of flying.
“I wanted to stop here first partly because it so resembles your Christian concept of Hell. But it’s Heaven to the people who live here.”
“People?”
“Or ‘creatures.’ In Tlingit there’s a word that encompasses both. There!”
We descended toward what looked like a patch of a different kind of vegetation, a clump of large transparent tubes. Unlike the other plants, though, they were mobile, twining slowly around each other. They looked like something that belonged in the sea, caressed by slow currents.
As we touched ground, he changed back into his avian manifestation. “They know me as Raven,” he said, and I heard the capitalization. He fluttered down to the base of the seven tubes. “Take off your shoes.”
I did, and the ground was surprisingly pleasant, warm and spongy. I worked my toes into it, though, and was rewarded by a sharp pinch.
“Don’t do that. This is their brain you’re standing on—the part they all share, anyhow. Stand still and they’ll talk to you through your feet.”
That’s exactly what they did, and it was amazing. It felt as if they’d asked me a thousand questions over the course of a minute, and my brain responded directly, without translating the answers into speech.
They talked back, in a sense. It wasn’t language so much as feeling. There was sympathy for my loss—six of them were children of the central one—but with an admonition to hold on to life, although what they actually meant was both more specific and harder to express. The point of life was, to them, posing problems and solving them, and passing on the solutions.
“These people were old before life appeared on your Earth,” Raven said. “This particular seven have been alive for more than a million years.”
“Are they immortal? They’ll live forever?”
“No. They’ll live another million or ten million years. When they agree to die, they produce a spore, which will grow into another family on this spot.”
“Another seven?”
“Or eleven, sometimes, or thirteen. One of them volunteers to stay alive for a while and act as parent, as teacher.
“It’s not suicide, since their essence is preserved in the parent, as is the essence of the thousand generations that went before.”
How ugly and alien they might seem if I hadn’t been literally in touch with them. Worms wriggling around, sticky secretions. But they were in a state of perfect love, angels living in Hell. “Why do they have to die?”
“They die when they’ve learned all they can. You know of Mendel’s genetics experiments.”
“Yes.” Again, it hadn’t been a question.
“They need to replace themselves with a genetically different family. A group that can look at all the accumulated knowledge from a different point of view.”
“That’s all they do?” I said. “They don’t have to worry about food, water, shelter?”
“Angels don’t strive. They absorb radiant energy through the plants around them. They have a thing like a tap root that extends below the water table. As for shelter, there’s no weather on this part of the planet—though it’s fierce around the circumference where dark meets light, a never-ending storm.”
“But if they don’t go anyplace or do anything, how can they find new things to think about?”
“Through people like you and me. They’ve never met anyone from Earth before, so you gave them lots of new experiences and feelings to consider.”
“You said they know you. You’re from Earth.”
“Not actually. I’m a kind of a visitor. A ‘guardian’ is the closest human word.”
“My guardian?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” He hopped around to face the angels. “People like me are especially interesting to them, because we travel around. They want to know where they themselves came from, and how and why they wound up here.”
“Couldn’t it be like Darwin contends? If they evolved from simpler forms, they wouldn’t remember that far back, any more than we remember being infants.”
“Very good, Rosa, but that’s the point: on this whole planet there’s nothing more complicated than a bush. Nothing for them to have evolved from.
“Furthermore, on almost every planet there’s a particular kind of molecule that every living thing has. That’s true of every other species here, but not of them: they have a different molecule.”
“So they originally came from another planet?”
“That’s the simplest explanation. But their curiosity is not just a matter of genealogy—they wonder whether they were put here for some purpose, and what it might be.”
I smiled. “That sounds familiar.”
He let out an annoyed squawk, and continued in Gordon’s voice. “I’m not trafficking in religion here. These people don’t even know whether they’re natural, or some sort of artificially contrived biological machine, hidden in this out-of-the-way place to grind away at information for millions of millennia, ultimately to solve some problem that now is still beyond their ken.
“And if they are machines to that purpose, will they be switched off once they solve the problem?”
They began singing then. There was no other noise in this still place, except when Raven or I talked, but at first I didn’t realize it was coming from them. It was a sweet pure sound, like a glass harmonica, complex chords that became words in English:
Before you go back to Earth
Before you go home
Come here to share what you’ve learned
Come here to learn what we’ve thought about you.
“That’s unusual,” Raven said. “I didn’t know they could do that.”
“Can I, may I tell them ‘yes’?”
“Do.”
I told them that I would be glad to help them in their quest, and their response was a jolt of pure sensual pleasure that started in the center of me and radiated out. I curled my toes into their brain and got the warning pinch again. I didn’t have a word for it then, orgasm, but I knew the feeling from Doc’s tender ministrations. So the most powerful orgasm I’d ever had came through the soles of my feet, through the brain of seven man-sized worms. It was stranger than strange, but it did give me incentive to return.
“They know the workings of your body better than any human physician could. I suspect they’ve fixed things here and there.”
“They have.” I moved my arm in a circle, and the shoulder pain was gone. So was the pain in my finger joints. “But I’m the first human being they’ve met! Human from Earth, I mean.”
“They’ve seen a million varieties of both life and pain.”
Including the pain of loss. I still grieved as strongly for Daniel, but it didn’t make me want to stop living. I would live for both of us now.
“I could go back now,” I said to Raven, “and be out of danger. God bless you for bringing me here.”
“You might want to withhold your thanks for a
while.” The golden room appeared behind him.
“That’s right, other places to go.” I tried to thank them with my most fervent prayer—praying through my feet!—then followed Raven into the room.
The cinnamon smell was gone, replaced by a soft musk, like the smell of a kitten. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the wrenching disorientation.
It wasn’t as bad the second time. I knew what to expect, and knew it wouldn’t last forever.
“Open your eyes.” Room, raven, door. Outside the door, a steamy fetid jungle. “I’ll go out first. They don’t much like mammals here, except as food.”
He hopped out into the jungle about twenty feet, looking left and right, and then began to change. He grew to the size of an eagle, and then larger, impossibly large for a bird—and as he grew even larger, his shape changed, the wings becoming arms with taloned claws, his head a monstrous dragon’s head. He yawned, showing rows of white fangs longer than fingers, and roared, as loud and deep as an ocean liner’s foghorn. Steam issued from his horrible mouth; I expected flame.
The raven beckoned with impressive claws and I stepped out, a little apprehensive, feeling like food. But as soon as I was out of the room I started to transform, myself. My viewpoint rose higher off the ground and my vision began to change, as it had done when I was an eagle, eyes on opposite sides of my head. I could feel my body bulking and changing. I leaned back naturally and balanced on a long thick tail. Tilting my head to inspect myself, I saw that I was a smaller version of the raven, with the same pebbly skin, but where he was glossy black, I was a kind of paisley of green and brown.
Ten or twelve feet tall, I probably weighed as much as a small elephant. And I had an elephant-sized hunger. Through the jungle smell of mold and earth, marigold and jasmine, came a clear note of rotting flesh, as mouth-watering to this body and brain as a pot roast to my other.
The raven made a series of grunts and clicks that I understood: “This way.” He started crashing through the undergrowth and I followed him, rocking unsteadily from side to side at first, and then gaining confidence in the powerful legs. We came to a clearing where a large creature, twice the size of the creature he had become, lay dead and quickly decomposing in the heat. About half had been eaten, perhaps by whoever killed it. Smaller lizards and things that seemed both lizard and bird were feasting on the carcass. The raven roared at them, and I added my higher-pitched scream. They backed and flapped away, not in total retreat, but just to wait while we had our fill.
“Hurry,” the raven grunted and clicked. “Be ready to move fast.”
I hesitated, not because the maggoty carcass looked unpalatable—it looked as good as a beef Wellington—but because I wasn’t sure how to go about it. My arms were too short for the hands to reach my mouth.
The raven tilted down, his tail extended for balance, and tore at the flesh with his jaws. I did the same, and with an odd memory of bobbing for apples, quite enjoyed gulping down bushels of wormy flesh, crunching through bones to get to the putrid softness inside.
After about a minute of heavenly feasting, there was a piercing screech and Raven butted me hard to distract me from the banquet. Two creatures twice his size were stalking toward us, teeth bared, unmistakably challenging us to defend our lunch. Raven bounded away, and I followed him. We scrambled back down the path he’d torn a few minutes before, and when we came to the end of it, crashed determinedly through the solid jungle. I looked back, and the giants weren’t pursuing.
He wasn’t just running away, though; he had a definite direction. The jungle thinned and we splashed across a wide shallow river, out onto an endless savannah.
On the horizon was a single black mountain. He tilted his head at it and grunted one syllable: “There.”
We loped easily through the grass. I was aware that we had no real enemies here; I probably could have killed a lesser creature, like a human, with my breath alone. But we saw no other living things, which was no surprise. Our progress was as subtle as a locomotive’s.
The grass thinned as we approached the mountain’s slope. When it became a rocky incline, Raven stopped abruptly and turned back into a bird. I felt an odd churning inside, and became a woman again. My limbs ached pleasantly from the exercise, but I urgently needed both toothbrush and toilet.
“Here.” Raven hopped over to some tufts of grass. “Chew this.” I did, and it had a pleasant mild garlic flavor. Then I retreated behind a rocky outcrop, feeling a little silly for my modesty, and took my ease, then used smooth pebbles to clean up, Arab style.
I rearranged the strange clothing and returned to Raven. “Thank you. That was a fascinating experience.”
“A diversion,” he said, “and a quick lunch. This mountain is what we came for. You just shat upon a living creature.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry; we birds do it all the time. And it didn’t notice.” He turned to look up the slope. “It doesn’t know I exist, though I’ve shared its mind twice. Its essence.”
“What is it called?”
“It doesn’t have language, with no one to talk to. I call it the Dark Man.”
“Could I share its … essence, too?”
“That’s why I brought you here. But I warn you it’s disturbing.”
“More so than being threatened by hungry dinosaurs?”
“Oh, quite. Being a dinosaur yourself, you knew they’d leave you be once you surrendered the food.”
He was right; I hadn’t been scared, just annoyed. “What is there to fear here?”
“It’s not fear. Just knowledge of a special kind. Do you remember the time you first truly knew you were going to die?”
I thought. “Actually, no. I’m not sure.”
“It was when you saw the Brady photographs of the ruins of Atlanta. You were ten.”
The memory opened an emptiness. “All right. So this will be like that?”
“Perhaps worse. But I think you have to see it.”
“Right here?”
“No. We have to fly to the top.” He turned me into the eagle again. “Don’t think about what you’re doing. Just look at where you want to go.”
It was more complicated than that, but then suddenly simple, once I let instinct take over. I flapped awkwardly a number of times, but when I was a couple of yards off the ground, realized I should tilt into the warm wind that rose up the side of the mountain of the Dark Man. Then I could spiral up almost without effort.
A shadow passed over me and I looked up to see a flying lizard about my own size. Instead of a beak, it had a mouth like a barracuda’s, fangs overlapping up and down. It opened the mouth and screeched, and after a moment of terror I realized it wasn’t after me; it was threatening, warning me off the smaller prey. The flying lizard dropped, talons out.
“Raven!” I cried.
Just before it reached him, Raven turned into a monstrous machine of articulated shiny metal, twice the lizard’s size. The thing struck him with a clang; he slapped it off with a razor wing and it sped away in bleeding confusion.
Raven kept his metallic form until we reached the top. We both sculled onto a flat space and he turned back into a raven, and I into a woman.
“This way,” he said, hopping toward a dark cave. I was annoyed that he didn’t thank me for warning him about the danger. For a girl from Philadelphia, I made a pretty competent eagle. At the entrance to the cave, he stopped, and turned into old Gordon. He said a few words in Tlingit.
“Ask its permission to enter.”
“I thought you said the Dark Man wasn’t aware of us.”
“He isn’t, himself, but his body has defenses. It took me a while to figure this out: it won’t admit any creature that doesn’t have a language.”
“Any language?”
“Just ask it permission.”
The lines in bad Latin and French came to mind. “May I please come in, Dark Man?”
I guess I expected a magic door to creak open or something. But noth
ing changed, except for a slight cool breeze from the darkness. He changed back into a raven and hopped into the mouth of the cave, and I followed.
We picked our way through a jumbled pile of bones.
“You said it doesn’t have a language. Yet it only admits people and things who do?”
“Strange, isn’t it?” As if on cue, the huge toothy flying reptile skidded to a halt a few feet away, outside the cave mouth. Raven shrieked a warning at it, a painfully loud scream that reverberated in the small space. But the lizard had seen us change back into something resembling food, and of course didn’t stop to consider the oddness of that. It hopped into the cave, baring its teeth, and approached the pile of bones, leathery wings dragging behind, leaving a smear of blood.
It couldn’t see us. “Maybe you better change back,” I whispered.
Hearing me, it tilted its head to peer into the darkness. It picked up a long bone with a taloned foot and delicately gnawed on one end. Then it dropped it and raised its wings in a kind of protective tent over its head and made a sound between a growl and a crow’s caw, and stalked toward us over the bones, all teeth and terrible purpose. It got about halfway—I looked to Raven, who was watching with calm curiosity—and it suddenly stopped, cried out, and pitched forward, obviously dead.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Want to do an autopsy?”
“But … how did you know? This is his planet, and he just walked in and died.”
“It’s his planet, but there’s only one Dark Man on it. Creatures who find their way into the cave just die; they don’t have any way to warn the next creature. Unless they have language, in which case there’s no danger.”
“But how did you find that out?”
“I’m always asking around. Someone on another planet told me about the Dark Man and I came here. It’s an interesting experience.”
“Disturbing, you said.”
“That, too. Can you see me well enough to follow?”
He was black against gray. “Go ahead.”
It was less scary than a cave on Earth. Cool and damp, but nothing like spiders or bats—unless they could talk, I supposed. As we moved farther in, slightly uphill, it was obvious that the walls were dimly phosphorescent. We went around a curve and there was no more light from the entrance behind us, but I could still see Raven, and rocks along the path.
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