by E. E. Knight
The Padre sat down on his desk, facing the eight older students. The classroom should have contained forty or so, had all the teenagers within a long walk attended. But education, like survival, depended on initiative in the disorganized Boundary Waters.
Valentine settled in for a good listen, as he always did when the Padre parked himself on the desk in that fashion. The rest of the class, not having the qualified joys of living with the Padre, did not know as he did that when the Padre perched there, he was imitating another teacher from his own youth, a determined San Jose nun who had woken a hunger for learning in the ganja-smoking teen he still had trouble imagining the Padre had been. His mind insisted on wandering off to the games.
“We know so very little about these beings, the Pre-entities, except that they predate everything else we do know about life on Earth,” the Padre began. “I was telling you about the Doors yesterday. No, Mr. Doyle, not the Old World rock-and-roll band. I know we think of these Doors as a terrible curse, the cause of our trouble. Everything we know would be different if they had never been opened. But long ago they were marvelous things, connecting planet after planet in the Milky Way as easily as that door over there connects us with the library. We call the builders of this Interworld Tree the Pre-entities, because we are not even sure if they had bodies—in the sense that you and I have bodies, that is. They probably didn’t need our little chemical engines to keep going. But if they did have bodies, they were big. Some of the Doors are said to be as big as a barn.
“We know they existed because they left the Interworld Tree and the Touchstones. A Touchstone is like a book that you can readjust by laying your hand on it. They don’t always work correctly on our human minds, however; there are always a few who touch them and go insane from the experience, which I find easy to believe. But a person with the right kind of mind who touches one has what we might call a revelation. Like the downloads I was telling you about when we were talking about the Old World’s computer technology.”
The Padre looked down and shook his head. Valentine knew the Padre had a love—hate relationship with the past; when he was in his cups, he would sometimes rave about the injustices in the Old World, which had the ability to feed and clothe all of its children but had chosen not to. This might lead to tears over missing something called McDonald’s fries dipped into a chocolate shake, or overpriced souvenir T-shirts.
“The Pre-entities existed by absorbing energy; a very special kind of energy, produced by living things. Plants make it at a very low level. All animals, us included, possess it to a greater extent. This energy, which we call a ‘vital aura’ for lack of a better term, is determined by two factors in an organism: size and intelligence. The latter predominates. A cow, despite its size, gives off a smaller vital aura than a monkey. A monkey being the ‘brighter’ of the two in more ways than one, if you understand.”
A student held up her hand, and the Padre stopped.
“You talked about this before, but I never got if the aura was your soul or not. Is it, I mean?” Elaine Cowell was a thirteen-year-old, but so bright she stayed for all the lessons with the older teens.
The Padre smiled at her. “Good question, Miss Cowell. I wish I had an absolute answer. My gut feeling is that a vital aura is not your soul. I think your soul is something that belongs to you and God, and no one else can interfere with it. I know some people say it is your soul that gets fed on, but there is no way we can ever know that. I think of the vital aura as being another special kind of energy you give off, just as you give off heat and an electromagnetic field.”
Elaine fixed her gaze at an invisible point sixteen inches in front of her face, and Valentine sympathized. She was also an orphan; the Reapers had taken her parents five years ago in Wisconsin. She now lived with an aunt who scratched out a living weaving blankets and repairing coats. The others sat in; silence. Whenever the Padre discussed the Facts of Death with the older students, their normal restlessness vanished.
“So why aren’t they still around? I thought that energy stuff was what made the Kurians immortal?” another student asked.
“Evidently our Creator decided that no race can live forever, no matter how advanced their science. When they started to die, we think it caused a terrible panic. I wonder if beings who are nearly immortal are more afraid of death, or less? They needed more and more vital aura to keep going, and they cleaned out whole planets in their final years, trying to stave off the inevitable. They probably absorbed all the dinosaurs; the two events seem to have happened at the same time. In their last extremity, they ate each other, but it was all for nothing. They still died. With no one to maintain their portals, the doorways began to shut down over the thousands and thousands of years that followed. But pieces of their knowledge, and the Interworld Tree itself, survived for a new intelligence to find later on.”
Thunder rumbled outside, and the rattling of the rain increased.
“So we call the Pre-entities Kurians now?” a young woman asked.
“No. The Kurians come from a race called the Lifeweavers. They found the remnants of the Pre-entity civilization. They pieced some of their history and technology back together and made use of what they could understand, like the barbarians who moved into Rome. We get the word lifeweaver from their own language; it refers to those of the race who visit other worlds and interpopulate them. Just as man takes his livestock, crops, and orchards with him when he migrates, but is willing to adapt if something better is found, so did the Lifeweavers in their colonization of the Interworld Tree. Lifeweavers live a long, long time… many thousands of years. Some believe they were created by the Pre-entities as builders, but it seems strange that beings with a vital aura as strong as theirs would have survived the extinction throes of the Pre-entities.
“These Lifeweavers reopened the portals to our Earth about the time we were discovering that food tasted better if it was cooked first. Our ancestors worshiped them. Most of them were content to be teachers, but it seems a few wanted to be more. A Lifeweaver can appear to us as a man or woman, or an elephant or a turtle if it wants, so they must have seemed as gods to our poor forefathers. They can put on a new shape as easily as we can change clothes. Maybe they threw thunderbolts for good measure. I think they inspired many of our oldest myths and legends.
“They adopted us in a way. As we grew more and more advanced, they took a few of us to other worlds. I’ve been told humans are living on other planets even now. If so, I pray their fortune has been better than ours. The Lifeweavers could do anything they wanted with DNA. They could make useful creatures to suit themselves, or modify a species as they required. We know they liked making beautiful birds and fish to decorate their homes; some of these still live on our planet today.”
The Padre smiled at them. “Ever seen a picture of a parrot? I think they tinkered with them a little bit.” He paused in thought.
Valentine had seen pictures of parrots. Right now the only birds in his mind were pheasants, tender young pheasants rising in a flutter of wings. He could see them in his newly won shotgun sight. He’d heard the Kolchuks’ lab-pointer pair had had another litter; maybe he could still get a puppy.
The Padre droned on.
Doyle held up his hand, serious for once. “Sir, why tell us all this now? We’ve known about vampirism and so on since we were kids. Okay, maybe some of the hows and whys were wrong. What difference does it make how any of it got started? We still have to hike out every summer—and every fall, a couple of families don’t come back.”
The Padre’s face crumbled. He looked ten years older to Valentine.
“No difference, no difference at all. I wish everyday of my life something could make a difference. Mr. Doyle, class, you are young, you’ve lived with it your whole lives, and it is not such a weight for you. But I remember a different world. People complained a lot about it, but in hindsight it was something like Eden. Why talk about this now? Look at the quotation on the board. Churchill was right. By looki
ng back, we may often see the future. I tell you this because nothing lasts forever, not even those who will do anything to become immortal. They’re not. The Kurians will eventually die, just like the Pre-entities. Once an old king paid to have a piece of knowledge carved deep in the side of a monument, something that would always be true. The wisest man of the age told him to carve the words ”This, too, shall pass.“ But who shall pass first, us or them?
“We will not live to see it, but one day the Kurians will be gone, and the Earth will be clean again. If nothing else, I want you to take that certain knowledge from me and carry it with you wherever you go.”
The rain left shortly after the rest of Valentine’s schoolmates did. He hurried to empty the various bowls, basins, and pails brimming with rainwater from the leaky roof, then headed for the kitchen. Father Max sat at the battered table, staring at the bottom of an empty glass. He was already recorking the jug.
“David, telling that story always makes me need a drink. But the drink I have always wants another to keep it company, and I should not do that. At least not too often.” He replaced the jug in its familiar spot on the shelf.
“That stuff’s poison, Father. I wouldn’t use it to kill rats; it’d be too cruel.”
The old man looked up at David, who poured himself the last of the cow’s vintage from the morning milking. “Isn’t the race today?”
Valentine, now dressed in faded denim shorts and a leather vest, bolted a piece of bread and washed it down with mouthfuls of milk. “Yeah, at four or thereabouts. I’m glad the rain stopped. In fact, I better get moving if I’m going to walk the trail before the race.”
“You’ve been running that trail since April. I’d think you’d know it by now.”
“All the rain is going to make the footing different. Might be muddy going up the big hill.”
Father Max nodded sagely. “David, did I ever tell you that your parents would have been proud of you?”
Valentine paused for a second as he laced his high moccasins. “Yes. Mostly after you’ve had a drink. It always makes you soft.”
“You’re a bit of the best of both of them. You’ve got his quick thinking and dedication, and enough of your mother’s looks and humor and heart to soften his edges. I wish he— they—could see you today. We used to call the last day of school graduation, you know that?”
“Yup. I’ve seen pictures and everything. A funny hat and a piece of paper that says you know stuff. That would be great, but I want to get us that gun.” He moved to the door. “You going to be in the public tent?”
“Yes, blessing the food and watching you collect first prize. Good luck, David.”
He opened the patched, squeaky screen door and saw two bearded men coming up the path from the road. They were strangers to him. They looked as though they had spent every moment of their adult years in the elements. They wore buckskin top to bottom, except for battered, broad-brimmed felt hats on their heads. They bore rifles in leather sheaths, but they did not have the shifty, bullying air that the soldiers of the patrols did. Unlike the soldiers charged by the Kurians with keeping order in the Boundary Waters, these men moved with a cautious, quiet manner. There was something to their eyes that suggested wary wild animals.
“Father Max,” Valentine called into the house without taking his eyes off the men. “Strangers coming.”
The men paused, smiling with tobacco-stained teeth. The taller of the two spoke: “Don’t let the guns scare you, boy. I know your people.”
Father Max emerged from the house and stepped out into the rain-soaked yard with arms outstretched. “Paul Samuels,” he half shouted, walking out to embrace the tall man in his gangly arms. “You haven’t come this way in years! Who is this with you?”
“My name’s Jess Finner, sir. I’ve sure heard about you, sir.”
The Padre smiled. “That could be good or bad, Mr. Finner. I’d like you both to meet my ward, David. He’s the son of Lee Valentine and Helen Saint Croix.”
“I knew your father, David,” said the one named Samuels. Valentine saw memories lurking in the brown pools beneath his wrinkled brow. “Bad business, that day at his place. I saw you after the funeral. Took us four months, but we got the men that—”
“Let’s not dredge up old history,” the Padre interrupted.
Valentine caught the looks exchanged between the men and suddenly lost interest in the race and the shotgun.
The Padre patted his shoulder. “We’ll talk later, David— that’s a promise. Get going! But give my regrets to the Council at the public tent, and get back here as soon as you can. We’re going to crack the seal on one of the bottles from the woodpile, and then you may have to put me to bed.”
“Not likely,” Samuels guffawed.
The Padre gave David his “I mean it, now” look, and Valentine headed off down the road. He still had time to look over the two-mile course if he hurried. Behind him, the three men watched him go, then turned and walked into the house.
The smell of cooking food greeted him at the campgrounds. The public tent, a behemoth, six-pole structure that saw weddings, baptisms, auctions, and meetings at the start of every summer, was hidden in a little glade surrounded by lakes and hills, miles from the nearest road and out of sight from any patrol in vehicles. The Hideout Festival featured sports and contests for the children and teenagers. A wedding or two always added to the celebratory atmosphere. The adults learned crafts; held riding, shooting, and archery competitions; and then feasted on barbecue each evening. Families brought their special dishes for all to share, for in a region of dreadful, cold winters and summers spent in hiding, there were few chances for large gatherings. With the festival’s conclusion, the people would scatter into the woods and lakes to wait out the summer heat, hoping that the Reapers would comb some other portion of the Boundary Waters in search of prey.
The race felt less a sport and more of a chore to Valentine by the time he reached the crowd. The people, horses, wagons, and traders’ stalls normally fascinated him, but the arrival of the two strangers held his thoughts in a grip that startled him. His desire for a ribbon and a shotgun in front of an applauding crowd seemed meaningless when compared with meeting a man who had known his father.
He resigned himself to running the race anyway. The course looped out in a horseshoe shape around Birch Lake. Usually a mud-rimmed half-swamp by mid-May, Birch Lake had swollen with the heavy rains until its fingers reached up almost to the public tent.
Valentine greeted Doyle and a few other acquaintances from school. He had many acquaintances but no close friends. As the Padre’s live-in student, responsibilities in keeping the house and school running prevented him from forming attachments, and if that weren’t enough, his bookish habits made him a natural outsider on the occasions when he did mix with the boisterous teenagers. He wandered off into the woods along the two-mile trail. He wanted time to be alone and to think. He had guessed right; the ground on the big hill to the west of Birch Lake was slick with clay-colored mud. He stood on the hill and looked out across the rippled surface of the lake toward the public tent. A thought sprang from the mysterious garden in his mind where his best ideas grew.
Fifteen boys participated in the race, though only a handful had enough points from the other Field Game events to have a chance at the prize. They were dressed in everything from overalls to leather loincloths, all tan and thin, tangle haired and wire muscled.
“One to be steady,” invoked Councilman Gaffley to the rocking assortment of racers. “Two to be ready, and you’re off!”
A few of the boys almost stopped a hundred yards into the race when Valentine made a sharp right turn off the trail, heading for Birch Lake. He sprinted out onto a long spit of land and thrashed his way into the water.
Valentine swam with lusty, powerful strokes, sighting on a tall oak on the other side. This neck of the lake was 150 yards or so across, and he figured he would be back on the trail about the time the rest of the boys skidded down th
e muddy hill.
And he was right, lunging dripping wet from the lake and pounding up the trail before the lead boy, Bobby Royce, could be seen emerging from the woods. David broke the string at the finish line with a muddy chest to a mixture of cheers and boos. Most of the boos came from families who had their boys in the race. A frowning Councilman grabbed it off him as if it were a sacred icon being defiled and not a piece of ratty twine.
The other boys hit the finish line two minutes later, and the debate began. A few maintained that the important thing was to race from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and the exact route, land or water, didn’t matter. The majority argued that the purpose of the race was a two-mile run cross-country, not a swim, which would be a different sport altogether. Each side increased its volume under the assumption that whoever made the most noise would win the argument. Two old men found the whole fracas hilarious, and they pressed a bottle of beer into David’s palm, slapping him on the back and pronouncing him a first-rate sport for getting Councilman Gaffley so huffy he looked like a hen with her feathers up.
A hasty, three-councilmen panel pronounced Valentine disqualified from the race, but the winner of a special award in recognition for his “initiative and originality.” Valentine watched Bobby Royce receive the shotgun and shells and wandered out of the tent. The barbecue smell made him hungry all over again. He grabbed a tin tray and loaded it from the ample spread outside. The homemade beer tasted vile. Had beer been this bad in the Old World? he wondered. But somehow it complemented the smoky-tasting meat. He found a dry patch of ground under a nearby tree and went to work on the food.
One of the backslapping oldsters approached him holding a varnished wooden case and dangling two more bottles of beer from experienced fingers.
“Hey there, kid. Mind if I sit with you a bit?”
