“I didn’t know,” he said at last. “I didn’t recognize the act for what it was.”
“Siang, you are a shortsighted fool, like all your kind. You have done incalculable harm to this happentrack.”
“I was weak,” he protested. “I’d lost a lot of blood. Your monster had savaged me, remember?”
“On most happentracks he killed you.”
Siang cried, “That mating wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been delirious. And that was your fault!”
“Nothing is my fault, ever,” said his beautiful mother. “It is not in my power to do wrong. But you can do wrong—and you would have, delirious or not. You were too close to that female. It was only a matter of time—she was quite intelligent.” Isahi paused, regarding him thoughtfully. “But she was not intelligent enough to have known your innermost desires. You supplied that image yourself; she was merely the catalyst. Tell me, Siang. What did you see?”
“See? I saw nothing. My mind was not clear. I saw an ape, that’s all.”
“I can’t read your mind—you know that. I don’t understand the workings of the Paragon psyche, even after all these centuries. You are utterly different from me. I do know that your pet ape must have appeared to you in some different form—and that form was what you most desired to see.”
He stared at her, speechless.
“Tell me, Siang,” she said again. “What did you see?”
And he made a sound that had no words, and rose and walked away. He walked for a long time, but he had no destination. There was no female human on Earth, not yet. There was only his mother, Isahi the Dedo.
Avalona Plans
Pakapata, hear my plea,
Pakapata, share my tree.
Stay a while and share a smile.
Pakapata, come to me.
—Ballad of the chaiga
It was midnight by the time Avalona stopped talking, but Nyneve was still wide awake. The tale had been a familiar one to Merlin, however, and the old man was dozing before the remains of the fire. Nyneve said finally, “So you and Merlin aren’t married, then?”
“He’s my parthenogenic son, of course. Whatever gave you the idea we were married?”
“Well, perhaps not married, if you know what I mean, but. … Well, you know. You live together. I’d assumed. …”
“I can assure you, Nyneve, that whatever Siang may have done, the Dedos remain pure in the service of Starquin.”
“I don’t think what Siang did was so wrong.”
“His name will live in infamy so long as the Dedos guard the Rocks.”
“Isn’t that rather … depressing? To harbor a grudge like that?”
“You know perfectly well it is impossible for me to feel depressed about anything.”
“You didn’t look too happy when you found out Starquin was doomed.” Nyneve used the word with some relish. “Why don’t you just forgive Siang and forget the whole business, if it’s so dreadful?”
“His descendants are everywhere, reproving us with their very existence.”
“Well,” said Nyneve, in a quick flash of temper, “I’m one of those descendants, and I can tell you I’m very happy to be alive. I enjoy my life, and the forest, and the village and everything. Sometimes I think,” she said recklessly, “that the only black spot is you, stalking about predicting gloom and doom. If there weren’t humans, there wouldn’t be anyone to appreciate what a wonderful place Earth is. The animals can’t appreciate it. They’re too busy trying to stay alive. And you certainly can’t.”
“That’s an illogical outlook, Nyneve. The Earth doesn’t feel any better because humans appreciate it.”
“But God does!” she burst out.
“The teaching of your church goes deep,” said Avalona. “Just a few hours ago you communicated with the only god in this part of the galaxy: Starquin, the Five-in-One. And yet you still persist in this irrational belief that there is somebody else. Will it help if I tell you your church will be discredited within two thousand years? Even now, the priests are sowing the seeds of their own destruction. They are simple humans, Nyneve, motivated by self-interest.”
In the morning, Nyneve awakened tired and ill-tempered. As she drew a pitcher of water she spent a few moments resenting Avalona and her air of omniscience. It took much of the fun out of life when you lived with someone who knew all the answers. Only the arrival of Merlin, who squinted slyly at her breasts as she worked the pump, gave her some reassurance of her worth.
“Later we must play the game,” he said. She ignored him.
Breakfast was a dismal meal. Merlin grumbled about his feet, which, if he were to be believed, afforded him pain comparable to childbirth. He’d been peeping into the ifalong in his narrow way, morbidly fascinated by his symptoms and seeking a cure from the knowledge of future medicine.
“Arthritis, they’ll call it,” he told Nyneve. “And they’ll have a cure, too. But we don’t have the technology, here and now, to make the drugs. So I’m destined for centuries of suffering. Woe is me.”
Avalona came out of her shell. “Perhaps you should direct your ifalong prying to a more practical end, Merlin. In the year 82,123 Cyclic—that’s just over thirty thousand years from now—Starquin will die, possibly during destruction of the very Rock we are charged to protect.”
“You are charged to protect.”
“And that means you and I will cease to exist, Merlin, unless we can avert the catastrophe. I rank this as a higher priority than your feet. We have much work ahead of us, and I will be needing a little help.”
Merlin mumbled something. Nyneve found the whole thing too remote to excite her, and somewhat unbelievable. Suppose Avalona was wrong? Thirty thousand years was a long time, and a lot of things would happen during that period. It was hardy likely that Avalona, within that small head of hers, could have correctly forecast every single happentrack. And in any case—
“Why doesn’t Starquin just fly away out of harm’s reach?” she asked.
“It’s not so simple as that. In many respects the acts of Starquin are inevitable, and it is the happentracks that must be changed to suit his purpose. Starquin is, and he will be; and his course was plotted long before life appeared on this planet.”
Merlin, meanwhile, was gloomily contemplating his demise. Over thousands of years he’d become accustomed to his place in the scheme of things, and he’d looked forward to this continuing for a few millennia yet. He enjoyed some standing in Mara Zion and the surrounding region, largely due to his shrewd prophesies. People looked up to him, respected him and asked his advice. They were even a little afraid of him—which was as it should be. But he didn’t feel contempt for humans, as Avalona did. He needed them as company just as Siang had needed Ap-Ap. He needed their respect. It was the only respect he got.
And now, assuming Avalona was correct, he would cease to exist in a pitifully few thousand years. It wasn’t fair. He’d never done anything wrong—and you can’t condemn a Paragon for his thoughts, he mused, absently eyeing Nyneve’s trim body. But to cease to exist—to suddenly be sucked back into Starquin’s tenuous and dying entity, never to possess free will again—didn’t bear thinking about too much.
“What are you doing about it?” he asked Avalona.
“I have made certain adjustments,” said the witch. “I have already set changes in motion. And now I’m going to take a look into the past.”
“Don’t kill the running ape!” cried Nyneve.
Avalona gazed at her. Outside, the moons cast hard shadows from the trees and a cool breeze entered the cottage. Nyneve shivered suddenly. She sensed that Morble was somewhere near, sniffing around on his adjacent happentrack—and this time he was not her protector, but quite the opposite. Avalona’s gaze was dispassionate and calculating.
“Nyneve,” said the witch at last, “you lack intelligence. If you are to continue to be my handmaiden you must pay heed to what I tell you, and you must use the little sense Siang gave you in applying thi
s knowledge to your everyday life. Otherwise you will be no good to me, and I shall have to set Morble on you. Now consider the past. Siang mated with the running ape on this very happentrack—you are the living proof of that. I can observe the past, just as I can foretell the ifalong. But how can I possibly change it? It has happened, it is done, it is gone.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nyneve.
Avalona’s brain, although infinitely superior to that of a human, was nevertheless composed of organic tissue. It was therefore subject to distractions, random meanderings, and forgetfulness. Although the degree of concentration required for reconstructing the past was minimal compared with foretelling the ifalong, she was careful to use the same little rituals and inner disciplines. She spent the day composing herself, because an error at this point could have unthinkable consequences. Merlin and Nyneve, glancing at her in anxious awe, retired to bed at nightfall. Soon afterward, Avalona was ready.
First she worked through the lifetime of her own mother, remembering the moment of death and the sudden wrench of parting. She remembered an earlier time when her mother, Allanah, had instructed her in the use of the Rock.
“This will be your duty when I am gone,” Allanah had said. “You cannot disobey it because it’s in your genes, an inherited instinct. Whenever a traveler is approaching in the greataway, a facet of the Rock will glow and you will place your hand against it. You will accept the essence of the traveler into yourself, divine his intent, and speed him on his way. And you will know the true Joy.”
Then Allanah’s eyes had clouded as her memory spat up a piece of unwanted knowledge. “There will be a Dedo who will fail her duty, and her memory will live forever in infamy. But she will not be you. Her name will be Shantun.” Dismissing that unfortunate excursion into the ifalong, she had continued, “Humans will discover the secret of greataway travel within your lifetime. You must be ready for that. Allow them to steal their rides, but do not reveal yourself.”
Allanah had lived and died, and passed on the word. And her mother before her. Now Avalona probed deep into the memories of Starquin. She blended those memories with her own intuitive knowledge of how things would have happened, to have got the way they were now. Back she went, riding drifting continents and watching changing life-forms; and the further back she went, the easier her work became. Until in the end it was simple, and the nearby greataway consisted of a mere billion or so happentracks—and almost certainly it had happened like this:
Ap-Ap returned to the tree house to find the big bald ape had gone, but this did not worry her. He’d gone before, many times, but he always came back. She squatted on the floor, eyeing his few possessions and recalling their mating. It had been much more protracted than the usual chaiga mating. The big bald ape had displayed an odd tenderness, clinging to her like a child afterwards instead of detaching, scratching and looking for something to eat. It had been a strange and friendly experience. Ap-Ap wanted to do it again.
But this time the big bald ape did not come back, and after a few days Ap-Ap returned dejected to her tribe. For a while they ridiculed her and tossed fruit peels at her, chattering. Soon they found other interests, however, and everybody forgot the big bald ape except Ap-Ap.
The Song of Earth tells that Ap-Ap then discovered she was pregnant, and this is true on many happentracks. But on a great many other happentracks, Ap-Ap was killed by a leopard as she crossed a forest glade, and on a few she drowned after falling from a rotten branch. On the vast majority nothing happened at all; she did not get pregnant, and the human race did not come into existence for eons. But on this particular happentrack she bore Siang’s son.
The tribe gathered in wonder and dismay and prodded the baby, chattering to each other because it looked different. It was almost bald, like the big bald ape. Its head was large and it looked puny and defenseless. Rok-Ko, the chief, pointed at the child and uttered a screech that meant: “Kill.”
But Ap-Ap bared her teeth and snarled, clutching the baby to her. Nobody had the courage to try to wrest it from her. So they left her alone and she raised the child herself, with little help from the tribe. She called him Si-Ank, in memory of his father. As he reached maturity, it seemed Rok-Ko’s misgivings had been well-founded, because Si-Ank did not have the power of pakapata. He was big and strong, however, and possessed a cleverness that filled Ap-Ap with awe. He disposed of the danger of Sha, the local leopard, by strangling the animal with a looped vine hung from a tree.
Then he mated with one of Ap-Ap’s nieces, and then another. …
The Children of Si-Ank, as they came to be called, were many. They soon left the trees because they were ill-suited for climbing, and took to foraging through the jungle. By the third generation they had earned the contempt of the chaiga for various reasons: they had no pakapata, they ate flesh, their males were violent and lusty and their females—to the shame of all good apes—clearly and noisily enjoyed the sexual act.
It was their insatiable appetite for sex that caused the final expulsion of the Children of Si-Ank from the forest.
The males had got into the habit of making playful but violent approaches to chaiga females if none of their own females came readily to hand. The latter, terrified, had used pakapata to pacify their tormentors. The males, suddenly seeing females of—apparently—their own species, had joyfully coupled with them. At any given time, more than two-thirds of the chaiga female population were pregnant by’ the new species’ males.
And the babies, when they were born, were not chaiga. …
Dimly aware that their species faced extinction, the chaiga banded together with the chimps and gorillas. There was a series of vicious skirmishes before the Children of Si-Ank, by now two hundred strong but hopelessly outnumbered, were driven out of the forest and onto the grassy shores of the great lake of Ot.
Here they settled, and became Mankind.
“And the shame of it was,” another Dedo said to another daughter in another time and place, “they had stolen the Joy. This is the only emotion our kind ever knows, the Joy that comes when we obey our duty beside the Rock, and speed a traveler on his way. The Joy was Starquin’s reward to us. But the Children of Si-Ank stole this holy emotion through the genes of Siang, and now they have it, both males and females. Neither do they use it as we do: wisely, on a few occasions in a lifetime. Instead they use it to encourage procreation. They will fill the galaxy with their kind, because they have degraded the Joy.”
Avalona, deep in her trance, considered her plan. Would it work?
She considered the human beginnings, and the kind of race memories that must be buried deep in mankind now, and even into the distant ifalong. She leafed through the pages of human history from those distant beginnings on the shores of Ot, up to the present day. She analyzed the human psyche and began to construct hypothetical ifalongs.
She analyzed the probable impact of the new a code of human behavior that Nyneve was promoting; the code that thrived on a violent and heroic glory.
Yes, humans would like that. Word from the village was that the stories were popular.
Nyneve would show a world where weapons ruled like judges and the verdict was always life or death, and revenge was honorable. In this new world, men would die for their land or their principles, and women would encourage them and bury them. Great heroes and heroines would arise. It was a bloodstained, wonderful world that Nyneve would create; but the important thing was, it would be vivid and memorable.
And in that distant, deadly future, the memory of this world would be carried to the people who mattered and they would heed it, and marvel at it, and shape their actions according to its code.
Yet Avalona was not satisfied.
Despite Nyneve’s beauty and storytelling skill, how could her impossible world survive in the dreary, brutish reality of human life today? Avalona cast about with her mind and considered the nature of happentracks. They branched; that was fundamental. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t rejoin at a later dat
e, did it? It was very unlikely, but not impossible.
Now, just suppose Nyneve’s incredible world existed, unknown on an adjacent happentrack, gradually approaching, until at the crucial moment … She saw the glory of Camelot bursting upon the dull world like the banners of a liberating army. It must be soon, because knights in armor would have little impact on a later technological society. And the memory of this world must last through thirty thousand years until it was needed. How could this be achieved? How to carry the glory into the future in such a way that it would be believed, and at the right time, reinforced …?
Breakfast-time seemed doomed, these days. Nyneve had hardly started to eat before Avalona said, “I shall need your help at the lake today, Nyneve. Stay around here until I summon you.”
“But I’d promised the gnomes a visit.”
“You will do as I say. And as for the gnomes, I would rather you didn’t become involved with them today. The work I have for you is on their happentrack, and it is best that they are not aware of your presence.”
Nyneve gave a short laugh. “That won’t be easy. I kind of stand out, in gnomedom.”
“You must not be seen. You will go to the valley where the sword lies on the rock. You remember that place?”
“I … I think so.” She shook her head. “I feel dizzy whenever I think of that place. Something funny must have happened when I went there before.”
Avalona said, “I was obliged to interfere with the natural course of events and remove you from that place by force. An unforeseen circumstance had arisen, and matters might have got out of hand.”
“ ‘Unforeseen circumstance’?” cackled Merlin triumphantly. “I thought you could foresee everything, my dear.”
“A gnome more adventurous than most had discovered the sword,” said Avalona in chilly tones. “There was a multitude of alternative complications arising out of Nyneve’s involvement in that situation. She had to be removed, thus causing the gnomes to lose interest.”
Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth) Page 16
