“Be off with you, you mad old crow!”
And as the old crow ran away, it called out its answer, laughing, “Why Tapmar, for he talks to nowhere!” confusing the words as it tumbled over the dunes and made its escape.
Argustal and Pamitar turned back to each other, vying with the strong sunlight to search out each other’s faces, for both had forgotten when they were last together, so long was time, so dim was memory. But there were memories, and as he searched they came back. The flatness of her nose, the softness of her nostrils, the roundness of her eyes and their brownness, the curve of the rim of her lips: All these, because they were dear, became remembered, thus taking on more than beauty.
They talked gently to each other, all the while looking. And slowly something of that other thing he suspected on the dark side of the shield entered him – for her beloved countenance was not as it had been. Around her eyes, particularly under them, were shadows, and faint lines creased from the sides of her mouth. In her stance too, did not the lines flow more downward than heretofore?
The discomfort growing too great, he was forced to speak to Pamitar of these things, but there was no proper way to express them. She seemed not to understand, unless she understood and did not know it, for her manner grew agitated, so that he soon forwent questioning, and turned to the parapatterner to hide his unease.
It stretched over a mile of sand, and rose several feet into the air. From each of his long expeditions, he brought back no more than five stones, yet there were assembled here many hundreds of thousands of stones, perhaps millions, all painstakingly arranged, so that no being could take in the arrangement from any one position, not even Argustal. Many were supported in the air at various heights by stakes or poles, more lay on the ground, where Pamitar always kept the dust and the wild men from encroaching them; and of these on the ground, some stood isolated, while others lay in profusion, but all in a pattern that was ever apparent only to Argustal – and he feared that it would take him until the next Sunset to have that pattern clear in his head again. Yet already it started to come clearer, and he recalled with wonder the devious and fugal course he had taken, walking down to the ravine of the Tree-men of Or, and knew that he still contained the skill to place the new stones he had brought within the general pattern with reference to that natural harmony – so completing the parapatterner.
And the lines on his wife’s face: Would they too have a place within the pattern?
Was there sense in what the crow beggar had cried, that he talked to nowhere? And … and … the terrible and, would nowhere answer him?
Bowed, he took his wife’s arm, and scurried back with her to their home high in the leafless tree.
“My Tapmar,” she said that evening as they ate a dish of fruit, “it is good that you come back to Gornilo, for the town sedges up with dreams like an old river bed, and I am afraid.”
At this he was secretly alarmed, for the figure of speech she used seemed to him an apt one for the newly observed lines on her face; so that he asked her what the dreams were in a voice more timid than he meant to use.
Looking at him strangely, she said, “The dreams are as thick as fur, so thick that they congeal my throat to tell you of them. Last night, I dreamed I walked in a landscape that seemed to be clad in fur all around the distant horizons, fur that branched and sprouted and had somber tones of russet and dun and black and a lustrous black-blue. I tried to resolve this strange material into the more familiar shapes of hedges and old distorted trees, but it stayed as it was, and I became … well, I had the word in my dream that I became a child.”
Argustal looked aslant over the crowded vegetation of the town and said, “These dreams may not be of Gornilo but of you only, Pamitar. What is child?”
“There’s no such thing in reality, to my knowledge, but in the dream the child that was I was small and fresh and in its actions at once nimble and clumsy. It was alien from me, its motions and ideas never mine – and yet it was all familiar to me. I was it, Tapmar, I was that child. And now that I wake, I become sure that I once was such a thing as a child.”
He tapped his fingers on his knees, shaking his head and blinking in a sudden anger. “This is your bad secret, Pamitar! I knew you had one the moment I saw you! I read it in your face which has chanted in an evil way! You know you were never anything but Pamitar in all the millions of years of your life, and that child must be an evil phantom that possesses you. Perhaps you will now be turned into child!”
She cried out and hurled a green fruit into which she had bitten. Deftly, he caught it before it struck him.
They made a provisional peace before settling for sleep. That night, Argustal dreamed that he also was small and vulnerable and hardly able to manage the language; his intentions were like an arrow and his direction clear.
Waking, he sweated and trembled, for he knew that as he had been child in his dream, so he had been child once in life. And this went deeper than sickness. When his pained looks directed themselves outside, he saw the night was like shot silk, with a dappled effect of light and shadow in the dark blue dome of the sky, which signified that the Forces were making merry with the sun while it journeyed through Yzazys; and Argustal thought of his journeys across the face of Yzazys, and of his visit to Or, when the Tree-men had whispered of an unknown element that forces change.
“They prepared me for this dream!” he muttered. He knew now that change had worked in his very foundations; once, he had been this thin tiny alien thing called child, and his wife had been too, and possibly others. He thought of that little apparition again, with its spindly legs and piping voice; the horror of it chilled his heart; he broke into prolonged groans that all Pamitar’s comforting took a long part of the dark to silence.
* * *
He left her sad and pale. He carried with him the stones he had gathered on his journey, the odd-shaped one from the ravine and the ones he had acquired before that. Holding them tightly to him, Argustal made his way through the town to his spatial arrangement. For so long, it had been his chief preoccupation; today, the long project would come to completion; yet because he could not even say why it had so preoccupied him, his feelings inside lay flat and wretched. Something had got to him and killed contentment.
Inside the prospects of the parapatterner, the old beggarly man lay, resting his shaggy head on a blue stone. Argustal was too low in spirit to chase him away.
“As your frame of stones will frame words, the words will come forth stones,” cried the creature.
“I’ll break your bones, old crow!” growled Argustal, but inwardly he wondered at this vile crow’s saying and at what he had said the previous day about Argustal’s talking to nowhere, for Argustal had discussed the purpose of his structure with nobody, not even Pamitar. Indeed, he had not recognized the purpose of the structure himself until two journeys back – or had it been three or four? The pattern had started simply as a pattern (hadn’t it?) and only much later had the obsession become a purpose.
To place the new stones correctly took time. Wherever Argustal walked in his great framework, the old crow followed, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four. Other personages from the town collected to stare, but none dared step inside the perimeter of the structure, so that they remained far off, like little stalks growing on the margins of Argustal’s mind.
Some stones had to touch, others had to be just apart. He walked and stooped and walked, responding to the great pattern that he now knew contained a universal law. The task wrapped him around in an aesthetic daze similar to the one he had experienced traveling the labyrinthine way down to Or, but with greater intensity.
The spell was broken only when the old crow spoke from a few paces away in a voice level and unlike his usual sing-song. And the old crow said, “I remember you planting the very first of these stones here when you were a child.”
Argustal straightened.
Cold took him, though the bilious sun shone bright. He could not find his voice. A
s he searched for it, his gaze went across to the eyes of the beggar-man, festering in his black forehead.
“You know I was once such a phantom – a child?” he asked.
“We are all phantoms. We were all childs. As there is gravy in our bodies, our hours were once few.”
“Old crow … you describe a different world – not ours!”
“Very true, very true. Yet that other world once was ours.”
“Oh, not! Not!”
“Speak to your machine about it! Its tongue is of rock and cannot lie like mine.”
He picked up a stone and flung it. “That will I do! Now get away from me!”
The stone hit the old man in his ribs. He groaned, painfully and danced and backward, tripped, lay full length in the sand, hopeless and shapeless.
Argustal, was upon him at once.
“Old crow, forgive me! It was fear at my thoughts made me attack you – and there is a certain sort of horror in your presence!”
“And in your stone-flinging!” muttered the old man, struggling to rise.
“You know of childs! In all the millions of years that I have worked at my design, you have never spoken of this. Why not?”
“Time for all things … and that time now draws to a close, even on Yzazys.”
They stared into each other’s eyes as the old beggar slowly rose, arms and cloak spread in a way that suggested he would either fling himself on Argustal or turn in flight. Argustal did not move. Crouching with his knuckles in the sand, he said, “… even on Yzazys? Why do you say so?”
“You are of Yzazys! We humans are not – if I call myself human. Thousands of thousands of years before you were child, I came from the heart stars with many others. There is no life there now! The rot spreads from the center! The sparks fly from sun to sun! Even to Yzazys, the hour is come. Up the galactic chimneys the footprints drum!” Suddenly he fell to the ground, was up again, and made off in haste, limbs whirling in a way that took from him all resemblance to human kind. He pushed through the line of watchers and was gone.
For a while, Argustal squatted where he was, groping through matters that dissolved as they took shape, only to grow large when he dismissed them. The storm blew through him and distorted him, like the trouble on the face of the sun. When he decided there was nothing for it but to complete the parapatterner, still he trembled with the new knowledge: Without being able to understand why, he knew the new knowledge would destroy the old world.
All now was in position, save for the odd-shaped stone from Or, which he carried firm on one shoulder, tucked between ear and hand. For the first time, he realized what a gigantic structure he had wrought. It was a businesslike stroke of insight, no sentiment involved. Argustal was now no more than a bead rolling through the vast interstices around him.
Each stone held its own temporal record as well as its spatial position; each represented different stresses, different epochs, different temperatures, materials, chemicals, molds, intensities. Every stone together represented an anagram of Yzazys, its whole composition and continuity. The last stone was merely a focal point for the whole dynamic, and as Argustal slowly walked between the vibrant arcades, that dynamic rose to pitch.
He heard it grow. He paused. He shuffled now this way, now that. As he did so, he recognized that there was no one focal position but a myriad, depending on position and direction of the key stone.
Very softly, he said, “… that my fears might be verified…”
And all about him – but softly – came a voice in stone, stuttering before it grew clearer, as if it had long known of words but never practiced them.
“Thou.…” Silence, then a flood of sentence.
“Thou thou art, oh, thou art worm thou art sick, rose invisible rose. In the howling storm thou art in the storm. Worm thou art found out, oh, rose thou art sick and found out flies in the night thy bed thy thy crimson life destroy. Oh – oh, rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm, the invisible worm that flies in the night, in the howling storm, has found out – has found out thy bed of crimson joy … and his dark dark secret love, his dark secret love does thy life destroy.”
Argustal was already running from that place.
* * *
In Pamitar’s arms he could find no comfort now. Though he huddled there, up in the encaging branches, the worm that flies worked in him. Finally, he rolled away from her and said, “Who ever heard so terrible a voice? I cannot speak again with the universe.”
“You do not know it was the universe.” She tried to tease him. “Why should the universe speak to little Tapmar?”
“The old crow said I spoke to nowhere. Nowhere is the universe – where the sun hides at night – where our memories hide, where our thoughts evaporate. I cannot talk with it. I must hunt out the old crow and talk to him.”
“Talk no more, ask no more questions! All you discover brings you misery! Look – you will no longer regard me, your poor wife! You turn your eyes away!”
“If I stare at nothing for all succeeding eons, yet I must find out what torments us!”
In the center of Gornilo, where many of the Unclassified lived, bare wood twisted up from the ground like fossilized sack, creating caves and shelters and strange limbs on which and in which old pilgrims, otherwise without a home, might perch. Here at nightfall Argustal sought out the beggar.
The old fellow was stretched painfully beside a broken pot, clasping a woven garment across his body. He turned in his small cell, trying to escape, but Argustal had him by the throat and held him still.
“I want your knowledge, old crow!”
“Get it from the religious men – they know more than I!”
It made Argustal pause, but he slackened his grip on the other by only the smallest margin.
“Because I have you, you must speak to me. I know that knowledge is pain, but so is ignorance once one has sensed its presence. Tell me more about childs and what they did! Tell me of what you call the heart stars!”
As if in a fever, the old crow rolled about under Argustal’s grip. He brought himself to say, “What I know is so little, so little, like a blade of grass in a field. And like blades of grass are the distant bygone times. Through all those times come the bundles of bodies now on this Earth. Then as now, no new bodies. But once … even before those bygone times … you cannot understand…”
“I understand well enough.”
“You are scientist! Before bygone times was another time, and then … then was childs and different things that are not any longer, many animals and birds and smaller things with frail wings unable to carry them over long time…”
“What happened? Why was there change, old crow?”
“Men … scientists … make understanding of the gravy of bodies and turn every person and thing and tree to eternal life. We now continue from that time, a long long time – so long we have forgotten what was then done.”
The smell of him was like an old pie. Argustal asked him, “And why now are no childs?”
“Childs are just small adults. We are adults, having become from child. But in that great former time, before scientists were on Yzazys, adults produced childs. Animals and trees likewise. But with eternal life, this cannot be – those child-making parts of the body have less life than stone.”
“Don’t talk of stone! So we live forever … you old ragbag, you remember – ah, you remember me as child?”
But the old ragbag was working himself into a kind of fit, pummeling the ground, slobbering at the mouth.
“Seven shades of lilac, even worse I remember myself a child, running like an arrow, air, everywhere fresh rosy air. So I am mad, for I remember!” He began to scream and cry, and the outcasts round about took up the wail in chorus. “We remember, we remember!” – whether they did or not.
Clapping his hand over the beggar’s mouth, Argustal said, “But you were not child on Yzazys – tell me about that!”
Shaking, the other replied, “Earlier I tell you – all hu
mans come from heart stars. Yzazys here is perched on universe’s end! Once were as many worlds as days in eternity, now all burned away as smoke up the chimney. Only this last place was safe.”
“What happened? Why?”
“Nothing happened! Life is life is life – only except that change crept in.”
And what was this but an echo of the words of the Tree-men of Or who, deep in their sinful glade, had muttered of some unknown element that forced change? Argustal crouched with bowed head while the beggarman shuddered beside him, and outside the holy idiots took up his last words in a chant: “Change crept in! Change crept in! Daylight smoked and change crept in! Change crept in!”
Their dreadful howling worked like spears in Argustal’s flank. He had pictures afterward of his panic run through the town, of wall and trunk and ditch and road, but it was all as insubstantial at the time as the pictures afterward. When he finally fell to the ground panting, he was unaware of where he lay, and everything was nothing to him until the religious howling had died into silence.
Then he saw he lay in the middle of his great structure, his cheek against the Or stone where he had dropped it. And as his attention came to it, the great structure around him answered without his having to speak.
He was at a new focal point. The voice that sounded was new, as cool as the previous one had been choked. It blew over him in a cool wind.
“There is no amaranth on this side of the grave, oh Argustal, no name with whatsoever emphasis of passionate love repeated that is not mute at last. Experiment X gave life for eternity to every living thing in the world, but even eternity is punctuated by release and suffers period. The old life had its childhood and its end, the new had no such logic. It found its own after many millennia, and took its cue from individual minds. What a man was, he became; what a tree, it became.”
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 37
