"This is the capital?" Ulysses said, waving his hand at the city on the hill. It was the largest habitation he had seen so far, but even so, it could not hold more than thirty thousand, including the humans.
"No," Ghlikh said. "Bruuzhgish is many miles to the east. It is there that the Hand of Nesh and his aid, Shegnif, live."
Ghlikh used a word to indicate Shegnifs position which could be translated as Grand Vizier.
Gooshgoozh spoke again, and Ghlikh said that they must leave the ship and march up the hill to the garrison. There they would all be provided with transportation to the capital. Apparently, he was not worried about the weapons which the party carried.
Ulysses left first to stand beside the towering Gooshgoozh. The giant exuded an odour more like a sweating horse than an elephant. Ulysses found it rather pleasant. The Neshgai's stomach was, however, rumbling, a phenomenon that was to surround Ulysses in this land. Moreover, the Neshgai began to chew on a big stick made of pressed vegetables and chewed as he gave more orders to his soldiers. The Neshgai spent much time eating because of the demands of their big stomachs. But not as much time as an elephant would.
Finally organised, the cavalcade marched up a street which ran straight up the hill. The Neshgai soldiers, human slaves and nonhuman officers, followed the line of newcomers. Wulka carried Khyuks on his back. Ulysses, carrying Ghlikh, followed the enormous Gooshgoozh. He walked very dignifiedly, and very slowly, up the hill. By the time they reached the top, he was panting, and saliva was running out of his mouth. Ulysses remembered a comment by Ghlikh that the Neshgai were prone to heart disease, lung and back trouble, and distress of the feet and legs. They paid for the combination of great size with a bipedal structure.
The street was paved with bricks set in mortar and was about fifty feet wide. The houses were square, had triple domes, and were covered with many figures and geometric designs and painted in a manner that was called "psychedelic" in Ulysses' time. There were no citizens or slaves in the street because the soldiers cleared them out. But many grey or tanned faces looked out of the windows and doors at them as they passed. According to Ghlikh, the Neshgai had never seen the furry feline beings before.
Gooshgoozh left them standing outside the garrison fort, which was a castle-like structure built of cyclopean blocks of granite. An hour passed and then another hour. It was just like being in the army, Ulysses thought. Hurry and wait, hurry and wait. Ten million years had made a new genus of sentient but had made no difference in military procedure.
Awina had been shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, but she finally came up to Ulysses and leaned against him.
She said, "I am afraid, my Lord. We have put ourselves into the hands of the long-nosed men, and whatever they decide to do with us will be done. We are too few to fight our way out."
Ulysses patted her back and then stroked it, enjoying even in his anxiety the sensuous softness of the fur. He said, "Do not worry. The Neshgai seem to be an intelligent people. They will realise that I have too much to offer for them to dispose of us as if we were a pack of wild dogs."
That had been his original reason for so boldly entering into the Neshgai territory. But now the galley had made him wonder. What if these people were so far advanced that nothing he could offer them could match what they already had? It was true that he had seen no signs of land transportation using motors, and that seemed strange. Perhaps the motors the galley used required too much space and fuel to be used in automobiles. In which case, he could show them how to build steam cars.
Then the gates of the fort opened, and a line of automobiles and trucks drove out. They looked somewhat like the earliest cars of his time, more like modified carriages and wagons. They were built of wood except for the wheels and tires. The wheels seemed to be of glass or another plastic which looked like glass. (Glass, of course, was a plastic.) The tires looked like white rubber, and they were (as he found out later) made of the specially treated sap of a tree which had not existed in his time.
The vehicles had to be huge to accommodate the gigantic Neshgai. The steering wheels were enormous, more like those of sailing ships. They seemed to require great hands and strength to turn, which may have been why only Neshgai were the chauffeurs, even for the trucks. However, Ghlikh said that the humans were never trusted to operate cars or any advanced technological devices except the voice transmitters.
No sound came from under the hood. Ulysses put his hand on the wooden hood but could feel no vibrations. He asked Ghlikh what drove the cars, and Ghlikh shrugged.
"I do not know," he said. "The Neshgai allowed me a certain amount of freedom as a trader of goods and information. But they would not describe their devices or even let me get close to any unless I was supervised."
This must have been frustrating for Ghlikh, Ulysses thought, since his primary objective here would undoubtedly be to get the secret of Nesghai technology.
Their culture contained many contradictions. There were so many primitive things here, side by side with advanced devices. The Neshgai had bows and arrows and plastic-tipped spears but no gunpowder. Or perhaps they knew about gunpowder but had no firearms because they lacked the metal or a plastic which could be used in the place of metal.
Gooshgoozh sat in the back of the foremost vehicle. He stopped eating a huge dish of vegetables and drinking from a pitcher of milk long enough to order food for the humans and the newcomers. Most of this was vegetable, but there was some horse meat. Horses were also used, as he discovered, for drawing wagons and carriages for the human slaves and the rural Neshgai.
After the food was eaten, most of Ulysses' party was herded into the trucks, and the human soldiers piled in with them. Ulysses, his chiefs, Awina and the two bat-men went into the car behind Gooshgoozh's. His car moved out onto a brick road covered with plastic into which was set pieces of brick to afford more traction. Ulysses watched the driver, who controlled his speed and the braking with a single pedal under his right foot. The instrument panel held a number of dials and gauges with various symbols around the faces. Ulysses studied them because they were the first indications of writing he had seen. There were some familiar symbols, a reversed 4, an H on its side, an O, a T, a barred Z, but these were symbols whose simplicity made it probable that they would be independently invented.
The vehicles had windshields but the sides were open. Wind was no problem since the cars never exceeded an estimated twenty miles an hour. And they slowed down to ten when ascending steep hills. There was not even a slight purr from the motors.
After about an hour and a half, the cavalcade drove into the square of a large fort, and the party got out of their vehicles into others. Ulysses did not understand why they should have to exchange cars as if they were riders of the Pony Express. Then it occurred to Ulysses that his simile of the Pony Express might be more appropriate than he had thought. Maybe the motors were not mechanical or electrical but were biological. Could the Neshgai be using some kind of muscle engine?
He saw a slave pouring fuel into the tank through a pipe on the side of the hood, and this strengthened his theory. The stuff was certainly not gasoline or anything like that. It was thick and syrupy and had a vegetable odour. Food for the living motor?
The cavalcade set out again, proceeding through country as before. This was rolling and heavily wooded except for the cleared fields and farm-houses. There were some strange plants growing in these, and once, when they stopped to rest, he walked over to the nearest growth. Nobody tried to stop him, though three archers did stay close. The plants were about seven feet high, green, and made of thin stalks topped by box-like growths of a darker green. He pulled one over to examine it. The stalk bent readily without indications of breaking. He opened the fleshy box by digging his fingers into a slit across its top. Beneath the layers of soft greenish leaves was a thin cartilaginous plate the surface of which was crossed by broad and thin dark lines. At the junction of the lines were little green pulpy nipples. He tried t
o visualise what the plate would look like when it ripened.
Unless he was using too much imagination, he was looking at a not-yet-matured printed circuit board.
Gooshgoozh said something, and everybody got back into the vehicles. Ulysses looked at the fields with more interest and, inside a mile, he saw another crop which he thought he could identify. Or, at least, he could make a reasonably inspired guess about its nature. These plants were short, squat and bore round cases wrapped in leaves. The cases were about four feet long, three wide and two deep. His theory was that these were the motors for the vehicles. They were of vegetable, not animal origin, though they might be high protein plants.
He considered the implications of his discovery while they drove past more fields with a variety of plants the nature of which he could not even guess. They also drove through a number of villages composed of the larger, more finely carved and painted houses of the Neshgai and the smaller, bare, often unpainted houses of the humans. After a while, he quit trying to theorise about the vegetable technology of the Neshgai and considered the implications of the setups of the villages and the farms. The humans seemed to outnumber the Neshgai about six to one or about three human adults to one Neshgai adult. Huge as the Neshgai were, strong as they seemed to be, one Neshgai should not be a match for three swifter co-operating humans, even if some of the humans were female.
What kept the humans from revolting? A slave mentality? Some weapon which made the Neshgai invincible? Or were the humans actually living in a symbiosis with the Neshgai which was profitable enough for the humans so that they did not mind slavery?
He considered the human soldiers sitting on seats facing him. They were half-bald. Both the men and the women he had seen in the villages were half-bald, though the children had a full head of hair. The hair was very curly, almost kinky.
Their skins were a beautiful dark brown. Their eyes were brown or, sometimes, greenish-brown. The faces were mainly narrow with a tendency to aquiline noses, jutting chins, and high cheekbones.
The only nonhuman feature was their lack of a little toe. But this could be accounted for by evolution. After all, some speculators, scientists and laymen alike, had said that man might lose his little toe. And his wisdom teeth.
He leaned forward and spoke in Ayrata to the soldier opposite him. The man looked puzzled, and a little alarmed, at first. Ulysses repeated his request at a slower rate. This time, the soldier understood most of the message. His Ayrata was not quite Ghlikh's or Ulysses', since Ayrata was his native speech, and it had deviated somewhat from the original. But Ghlikh knew the unfamiliar words and translated them.
The soldier looked dubious at first, but Ulysses reassured him that he meant no harm. The soldier turned and asked the giant in the front seat if he should obey. The great elephantine head turned, looked at Ulysses, and then spoke. The soldier opened his mouth wide, and Ulysses looked inside and ran his finger along the teeth. There were no wisdom teeth.
Ulysses thanked him. The Neshgai took out a notebook and wrote something on it with a fountain pen the size of a big flashlight.
The journey took until late at night. They changed vehicles five times. At the end, they came down out of a series high hills onto a plain set on a cliff above the shore. The city was still well lit with torches and electric light bulbs. Or what looked like bulbs, though Ulysses thought they could be living organisms. They were attached to hard brown cases of living vegetable batteries or fuel cells.
The city itself was walled and looked more like an illustration of Baghdad in a copy of The Arabian Nights than anything else. The cavalcade drove through gates which were shut after them and wound through streets toward the centre of the city. Here they got out and were marched into a huge building and upstairs into a huge room where the doors were locked on them. However, they found food waiting for them and, after eating, went to sleep on the bunkbeds.
Awina climbed into the bunk above him, but he awoke in the middle of the night to find her clinging to him. She was shaking and sobbing softly. He was startled, but he controlled himself and asked her, in a low voice, what she was doing here.
"I had a terrible dream," she said. "It was so frightening it woke me up. And I was afraid to go back to sleep. Or even to be alone in bed. So I came down here to get strength and courage from you. Did I do wrong, my Lord?"
He rubbed her between the ears and then stroked and fondled the kitten-fur-smooth ears.
"No," he said. He had gotten used to having the felines touch him so that they might draw from him some of his god-like qualities. It was a harmless superstition and it did benefit them psychologically.
He looked around. The bulbs, set in clusters in containers on the wall, were not as bright as when they had come into the room. They gave enough light so that he could see the others near him clearly, however. They were all sleeping. Nobody seemed aware that Awina was in his bed. Not that anybody would have objected. He knew by now that he had the power to do anything with them that he wished, and they would not object. He was their god, even if he was, after all, a small god.
"What was the dream?" he said, continuing to stroke her. Now he ran his fingers along her jaw and then up and over her round wet nose.
She shivered and then said, "I dreamed that I was sleeping in this very place. And then two of the grey-skins came in and lifted me out of my bed and carried me out of this place. They took me down many halls and down many dark staircases and into a deep chamber beneath this city. There they chained me to the wall and then began to hurt me terribly. They rammed their tusks into me and tried to pull my legs off with their trunks and, finally, they unchained me and threw me on the floor and started to crush me with their great feet.
"At that moment, the door to the room opened, and I saw you in the next room. You were standing there with your arm around a human female. She was kissing you and you saw me and laughed at me when I begged you to help me. And then the door clanged shut and the Neshgai began to step on me again, and one said, 'The Lord takes a human mate tonight!'
"And I said, 'Then let me die.' But I did not really want to die. Not away from you, my Lord."
Ulysses considered her dream. He had had enough of his own dreams concerning her to know what his unconscious was trying to tell him, although he was also consciously aware of what his feelings were. An interpretation of her dream was difficult, though. If he used the Freudian dictum that dreams represented wishes, then she wished him to have a human female as a mate. And she also wished to punish herself. But punish herself for what? She would not be guilty about any desire for him. The Wufea culture did have plenty of things about which their people could feel guilty, as did all cultures, human or nonhuman, but this was not one of them.
The trouble was that the Freudian dictum had never been proved to be true and, second, the subconscious of people descended from cats (if they were from cats) might differ from those of people descended from apes.
Whatever the interpretation of her dream, it was evident that she was worried about human females. Yet he had never given her any reason to consider him anything other than a god. Or to consider herself as any more than a good assistant to a god, even if the god was fond of her.
"Are you all right now?" he said. "Do you think you could get back to sleep?"
She nodded.
"Then you had better get back up into your bed."
She was silent for a moment. Her body had stiffened under his hand. She said quietly, "Very well, my Lord. I did not mean to offend you."
"You did not offend me," he said. He thought he should not add anything. He might weaken and ask her to stay with him. He needed some comforting of his own.
She climbed out of his bed and went up the ladder into her own. He lay for what seemed a long while, while the tired and anxious Wufea, Wagarondit and Alkunquib snored, stirred or muttered around him. What would tomorrow bring? Today, rather, since it surely would be dawn soon.
He felt as if he were swinging in the cradle
of time. Time. No one understood it, no one could explain it. Time was more mysterious than God. God could be understood, God was thought of as being like a man. But Time was not at all understood, its essence and origin not even lightly touched as it went by.
He was swinging in the cradle of time. He was the ten-million-year-old baby. Maybe the ten-billion-year-old baby. Ten million years. No other living creature had endured such a passage of time whatever time was, and yet ten million or ten billion years were nothing in time. Nothing. He had endured—not lived—ten million years, and he must die soon. And if he did—when he did—he might as well have never lived. He would be no more than some miscarriage that had occurred in some subhuman two million years before he was born. Just as much and no more, and what good was life for him? Or for anybody?
He tried to shunt this train of thought off into oblivion. He was alive, and this sort of philosophising was useless, even if inevitable for a sentient. Even the less intelligent of human beings must surely think of the futility of individual life and of the incomprehensibility of time at least once in his/her life. But to dwell on such thoughts was neurotic. Life was its own answer, question and answer wrapped up in one skin.
The Stone God Awakens Page 15
