by Allen Steele
Then, one summer night, as Jed lay outside, he spotted a star more brilliant than any he’d ever seen before, one which behind a thin trail as it streaked across the moonless heavens. Startled, he sat up in time to hear a thunderclap just before it vanished behind the eastern mountain. Yet there were no clouds in the sky, so he knew that it couldn’t have been caused by an approaching storm…and besides, this particular star had moved the wrong way, from west to east instead of the opposite direction, as they usually did.
For the first time in many years, Jed went to sleep wondering about what he’d seen. By morning, though, these thoughts had largely been forgotten; there were more important matters to be dealt with today.
He went through his usual morning routine, then wandered over to the fields where the others were already on their hands and knees, digging up weeds from between the rows of crops they’d planted last spring. He’d barely commenced work, though, when he heard a faint, high-pitched hum. At first he thought it was a mosquito in his ear, but even as he reached up to swat at it, the sound grew louder, and now the others around him were rising to their feet.
Looking up, Jed saw what he first took to be a hawk, until he realized that it was much more high in the sky. The humming increased in volume as the bird began to descend, and it was then that he observed that its wings didn’t move. By now the sound was very loud, and it was clear that the bird wasn’t a bird at all, but something else entirely: an object larger than anything he’d ever seen before, many times the size of the biggest hut in the village.
Shielding his eyes against the sun, Jed stood up and watched as the bird-thing quickly grew in size. The hum it made was deafening, and he instinctively clasped his hands over his ears, yet even as men and women screamed in fear and ran for their lives, leaving behind their tools and even the infants. Jed remained where he was. It wasn’t courage, really, or even curiosity that kept him in his place; it was utter astonishment, a complete and total sense of unreality. Like an animal frozen by fear, he was unable to move, although every instinct told him to flee.
A violent wind tore at him, ripping soybeans from the ground and hurling them into his face, as the giant bird came down less than a hundred paces from where he stood. Frightened and half-blinded, Jed fell to his knees, clenching the ground with his fists. The hum subsided as the beast settled upon great legs that lowered from its belly; Jed saw a pair of slotted eyes staring at him with what he perceived as malevolence. Certain that the monster intended to devour him, he lowered his head and hoped that death would come quickly.
He waited, yet nothing happened. Then he heard a faint whirr, and he looked up again to see a door open within the creature’s belly. Puzzled, he sat up on his haunches and watched as a ramp lowered from the door. A few moments passed, then, to his surprise, two figures walked down the ramp. They looked like men, yet they were dressed head-to-toe in white garments, with domes for heads. As they approached, Jed saw himself reflected in the silver masks of their faces: a naked savage, cowering in the dirt.
Surely these were gods, brought her by a great bird. Jed raised his hands, started to beseech them in his native tongue, yet he’d barely begun when one of them raised a stick and pointed it at him. Sparks flashed before his eyes; a moment of cold numbness, as if winter had suddenly descended upon him, then everything went dark.
He awoke in a place like none other he’d ever been before, a room whose walls were made of some substance that wasn’t grass, wood, or stone, its margins were straight and well-defined. Light as bright as the afternoon sun, yet with none of its warmth, glowed from panels within its ceiling. He lay upon an elevated bed covered with a fabric as soft as doe-skin, his arms and legs were held down by elastic straps. All around his bed were large objects that beeped and chittered and flashed multicolored lights; to his horror, he saw that long, slender snakes had attached themselves to the insides of his elbows.
Jed screamed in terror, began to thrash about in panic. Then a soft hand laid upon his shoulder, and he looked up to see a woman peering down at him. She was nearly his own age, yet her face was as pale and unblemished as the first snow of winter, her eyes as blue and clear as the sky, and when she smiled he saw that she had all her teeth. He couldn’t see her hair, for it was covered with a hood that came up from the one-piece garment that she wore, yet nonetheless she was the most beautiful female he’d ever seen.
She spoke to him as she gently stroked his arm, and although he couldn’t understand what she was saying, her tone of voice soothed him. Another voice from the other side of the bed; he looked around, saw a male standing nearby. He was dressed the same way as she was, yet when he turned toward them, Jed was startled to see that, although he was also Jed’s age, his face was as hairless as a boy’s. Despite his bewilderment, this made Jed laugh out loud. The woman laughed as well, although it seemed without quite knowing why; the male gave an uncertain grin, and then he gently patted Jed’s arm.
It was then that Jed determined what had happened to him. He’d perished, and his spirit had passed to another world, an afterlife where the angels were now preparing him for entry to the next plane of existence. He felt a pang of regret for all that he’d left behind—his friends, the girls with whom he’d shared evenings in the tall grass, the village where he’d spent his entire life—yet now he was surrounded by beings who meant him no harm, and he felt his fear began to ease. No harm could come to him here. He was already dead.
So he relaxed and let the angels study him, watching with a certain detachment as they groped and prodded his body, and watched the flashing lights on the things along the walls and conversed with each other in a tongue which he couldn’t understand. The female fed him water through a snake that came from a translucent gourd, and the water was fresh and more clean than any he’d ever tasted. The male gently examined his genitals with his hands, and laughed out loud when this produced an involuntary erection that caused the female to blush and quickly turn away. After a little while, they finished their study of him; the woman carefully placed a mask across the lower part of his face, and he briefly tasted air that smelled like mint leaves before he fell asleep again.
When he awoke, he was in another room, this one much like the first, yet bare save for the bed on which he lay and a large round pot attached to the wall. Jed found that he was no longer strapped down; he also wore clothes not unlike the ones the man and the woman had been wearing. He sniffed at the clothes, but was unable to detect a scent, yet when he inspected himself, he discovered that his skin was clean, and his hair and beard had been washed as well. This disturbed him, for he seldom bathed, and relied on body odor to help him identify those who were ill and therefore untouchable.
Walking over to the pot, he found that it was half-filled with water. When he knelt beside it and tried to drink from it, though, he found that the water had an unpleasant aftertaste. Worse yet, when he backed away, the pot suddenly made a loud gurgling sound, and the water spiraled around and disappeared through a hole in the bottom, to be replaced by more water that flowed down from the inner rim.
Alarmed, Jed hastily backed away from the bewitched pot on his hands and knees. It was then that a door on the other side of the room slid open. He looked around to see the woman walk in. She was dressed the same way as before, yet now the hood had been drawn back from her hair, and he could see that it the color of cornhusks. Raising a hand to her mouth, she tried to hide her amusement at his reaction to the pot; seeing her smile, Jed smiled back at her. She was very attractive, and when she came closer to offer her hand to help him to his feet, he determined that this gesture was an expression of her willingness to share flesh with him.
He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her down to the floor. The woman shrieked and tore herself away; before Jed could bow in apology, she produced a stick from a pocket and pointed it at him. A painful shock raced through his body; he lost control of his muscles and collapsed to the floor.
Although he was unable to move, he didn�
�t lose consciousness. Stunned, he lay there for awhile, watching as the woman stood up and straightened her clothes. The man he’d seen before came in; he roughly dragged Jed over to a corner of the room and propped him against the wall, then went to the woman and comforted her. Then they both stood nearby and silently waited until Jed was able to move again.
Jed had learned his lesson. Sex was out of the question. He pulled his knees up against his chest and hugged them within his arms, and silently watched as the woman, smiling again yet more wary than she’d been before, strode to the opposite wall. Touching it, she murmured something he couldn’t understand; the wall vanished, and suddenly Jed found himself staring at the night sky.
Whimpering with fear, he huddled closer to the wall. The woman’s expression became sympathetic; cautiously coming closer, she squatted down just within arm’s reach and gently stroked his ankle, letting him know that there was no reason to be afraid. Yet it wasn’t until the man walked over to the night sky and actually touched it that Jed realized that this was only an illusion: the wall hadn’t disappeared, and the stars were just images. Jed’s dread became fascination; uncurling himself, he crawled on hands and knees across the room until, with great hesitation, he was able to touch the wall himself, and was assured that he wasn’t about to fall into the sky.
The wall changed again, and now he saw the Moon, many times larger than he’d ever seen it before. Delighted by its familiarity, he laughed aloud, and stroked its face with his hands. The woman nodded, smiling her approval, then she said something that caused the image to change yet again. Now Jed saw something that looked like the Moon, but wasn’t: blue and green, dappled here and there with broad swatches of white. She said something he didn’t understand and pointed to him, and then back at the Moon-like thing again.
Jed gazed it in puzzlement, admiring its beauty yet failing to comprehend what it was or why he had any connection to it. The man and the woman glanced at one another, shared a few words, then the woman repeated the sequence: night sky, Moon, blue-green-white thing. Jed patiently observed the display once more; by now, though, he was getting thirsty, and decided to risk drinking some more water from the strange pot.
His visitors allowed him to do so. When he looked up again, they’d left the room, and the window-wall had become opaque once more. Baffled, Jed returned to bed. The ceiling lights dimmed as he lay down. After awhile he went to sleep, wondering why, if this was indeed the afterlife, it couldn’t be more pleasant.
It didn’t. It only became worse.
There were no days or nights in this place, or at least not as Jed understood them, only periods during which the ceiling lights would glow to life, awakening him from his slumber, and would darken again some time later, allowing him to go to sleep. During those wakeful periods, he’d be visited by the man and the woman; they’d bring him food, or at least something which remotely resembled food—plates of mushy cubes that had little taste or odor, which he ate only because he was hungry—and bowls of water that he drank once he came to understand that the pot was meant for relieving himself. They’d remain in the room while he had his meals, quietly observing him as he crouched behind the bed, disdaining the odd-looking implements they gave him and instead scooping up the food with his fingers; once he was done, they’d remove the plate and bowl. Then his ordeal would continue.
At first, it was all very simple and painless. The magic window would open again and he’d see things, some familiar, others so strange that he couldn’t comprehend their meaning. The window revealed the Moon—no problem there—but then it was immediately followed by an image of a vast, dry-looking landscape, without trees or grass, upon which lay vast white domes, with humanlike figures in bulky outfits with globes for heads moving about in the foreground; Jed failed to understand how one related to the other. Another time, the window showed the blue-green-white thing; very pretty, yet then the image slowly swelled in size, growing closer and closer, until it filled the screen and then Jed himself staring down at mountains. It was only through repetition that he realized that they were the same ones that he’d once seen when he was very young. The next image was his own village, as if seen from a bird flying high above; the first time he saw this, Jed rushed at the window, intending to dive through it so that he could return home, yet instead he ran face-first into the wall. The man laughed out loud at this, but Jed didn’t find it very funny. He rubbed his swollen nose and glared at the man in anger until the woman came over and gently massaged his shoulders, easing his anger.
The window-wall showed other images, one more mysterious than the next. A complex form, like a giant white tree whose limbs lacked leaves yet grew in all directions, floating among the stars. Showing this to Jed, the man would stamp his foot on the floor, then point first to Jed, then to himself and the woman, then back to the picture again. Jed failed to make the association. Pictures of great bodies of water, meadows that stretched out to great mountains in the far distance, artifices that looked like giant trees made of glass, towering walls of ice: all fascinating, yet he couldn’t make sense of any of them. Bird-things like the monster that had abducted him, screaming upward into the heavens on columns of fire; he quailed from these images, shielding his eyes with his hands, while the woman tried to comfort him and the man sighed in disgust.
And all the while, they babbled at him in their queer language. Through repetition, Jed eventually came to learn that the woman was called Sayrah and the man’s name was Peet; likewise, they came to know him as Jed. But beyond that, and a few elementary words—watah, foohd, roohm, floah, bayd, doah—all attempts at meaningful communication broke down. Globahl wahming, glayshas, isayge, sitees, disastah, loonah colonees, spayce stayshons, orbeet, suhvivahs: meaningless abstractions, syllables with no rhyme or reason. And the things that intrigued him—where the water in the magic pot came from and where it went, why the ceiling lights came on and off, what his clothes were made of, how the window-wall opened and shut—were beneath their attention, for they never bothered to explain them to him.
They gave him blocks of different shapes and sizes, and placed before him a board containing holes which corresponded with the blocks. Jed did his best to fit the blocks into the appropriate holes, but it took considerable effort, and even when he was finished Peet wasn’t satisfied. They gave him a sheet of paper and a set of colored paints, then watched to see what he’d do with them; Jed dipped a fingertip in the green dye and licked it, and ignored the paper. They gave him three red balls and one blue one; he happily bounced all four on the floor without discriminating between one or another.
Sayrah took notes, and Peet shook his head in frustration, and at some point they apparently decided that further efforts to educate him were pointless. After a feeding period, Jed found himself becoming groggy; he collapsed on the floor with his breakfast plate still in his lap.
When he awoke, he found himself in yet another room, naked once more and strapped down to a couch. Several men, one of whom was Peet, were standing around him; they wore hooded white outfits and had white masks across their faces. A bright light was suspended above him; when Jed squinted at it, he saw his own face reflected in its silver casing, and that was when he realized that his head had been shaved and his beard had disappeared.
But none of this was as terrifying as when he gazed down at himself. A snake had fastened itself to the crook of his right elbow; it was feeding upon his blood, which slowly flowed into a clear sack suspended from a rack next the table.
That was when Jed truly realized that he wasn’t dead after all.
As he began to scream, the masked men standing around him laughed. And the snake continued to drink his blood.
For days on end, this continued. He’d awaken, eat and drink, relieve himself in the pot, then wait for the men in white to come for him again. There were no more sessions with the window-wall, no more games with balls, blocks, or finger paints. The men would take him from his room—kicking and screaming, or unconscious; it mad
e no difference to them—and strap him to a table, then siphon more blood from his body. They did this carefully, allowing him time to recover so that he wouldn’t become anemic; afterwards he was given plenty of food to eat and a chance to sleep.
Yet the routine remained the same, and after awhile Jed resigned himself to his fate.
When he was alone in his room, he found himself remembering happier times. The warm summer days he’d spent in the valley, tending the crops and playing kick-ball with his friends. Before long, the memories came to him when he was on the table; he watched his blood streaming up through the snakes, and thought of autumn nights when he lay in the tall grass with women and gazed up at the stars.
With the growing realization that his old life was over, he became listless, rarely moving from his bed except when the time came for him to follow the men in white into the next room. He discarded the clothes he’d been given, and seldom ate anything given to him. After awhile, the room began to stink of feces and urine, for he’d ceased to use the pot.
Then, one day, he was led from his room, not to the place where he’d sacrificed so much of his blood, but to another room, one much further away. He found himself in the center of a circle of tables, behind which were seated dozens of men and women. Sayrah was waiting for him, and so was Peet; Sayrah smiled and gently stroked his arm, then led him to a chair and gave him a ball.
