But there it was. TO HERE . . . ULYSSES SINGING BEAR, FAMOUS PETRIFIED MAN, ACCIDENTALLY . . . TO HIM . . . MOLECULAR STASIS DURING SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT IN SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, TO OLD NATION OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. "PETRIFIED" STATE SINCE . . .
The date was unintelligible. For some reason, the Arabic numbers were not used. But the date had to be the equivalent of 1985 A.D. The date given for the erection of the exhibit was also unreadable.
It did not matter whether it was 6985 A.D. or 50,000 A.D., though it was probable that the earlier date was more correct. In fifty thousand years, the language would have become absolutely unrecognisable.
It did not matter. What did was that he had once sat on this metal, or plastic, platform with the affixed plate and many visitors, perhaps millions, had filed by and read these words (in various forms as the language changed) and gazed at the immobile features with awe. And also with amazement, since humans could not keep from making witticisms even in the presence of death. They would have looked at him with jealousy, too, if they had known that he would be living when they had been dust a hundred thousand times over.
He wondered what had happened to him. Had someone stolen him? Or, more likely, had he and the platform been located somewhere else, and then taken here? Had he been separated from the platform en route? Who knew what had happened? It had taken place so long ago that it would always be a mystery.
He straightened up, and Zhishbroom walked on ahead. They went down many corridors, and at last the Neshgai halted before a blank wall. He spoke one word, and the wall seemed to melt and then become fuzzy, and there was an open doorway. He followed the giant into a small room shaped like the interior of a ball. A silvery reflecting substance coated the interior and, in the middle of the room, suspended on nothing, was a huge silvery disk. Zhishbroom took Ulysses' hand and guided him to a spot before it. The disk hung vertically before him and reflected his image.
But it did not reflect Zhishbroom, who was standing directly behind him.
"I can read nothing in the Book," Zhishbroom said sadly.
He added, "Call out when you are finished reading. The door will open. I will then conduct you to Kuushmurzh, and you can tell him what you read."
Ulysses did not hear the Neshgai walk away. He continued to stare at his reflection, and then it disappeared. Evaporated, rather. Layer after layer of his flesh faded; his bones stood before him; they, too, slid into nothing; only the disk was left.
He stepped forward, thinking that he could not possibly step into the solid material—but did he know that it was solid?—and then he was inside. Or he thought he was. Like Alice through the mirror.
Things appeared around him as if they had been hidden by an invisible fog which had melted with the sun of his coming.
He walked forward and put out his hand and could touch nothing. He went through the great tree before him, passed through darkness, and was out on the other side. A woman, a beautiful brown woman wearing only earrings, a nose ring, finger rings, beads, and painted designs over half of her body, walked through him. She moved swiftly, as if she were in a speeded-up movie.
Things sped by. Somebody increased the speed of the movie even more. Then it slowed down, and he was standing by another gigantic tree in the light of the moon. The full moon was the moon he had known before he became stone. The tree was three times as large as the largest sequoia of California. Its base contained several entrances out of which a "soft" light fell. A youth of about sixteen, wearing ribbons and tassels in his bushy hair and around his ears, fingers, toes and other appendages, came through the well-tended park and entered the tree. Ulysses followed him up the staircase. He did not understand how he could walk up this and yet not be able to touch it. Nor why his hand went through the youth when he tried to touch him.
The youth lived inside the tree with a dozen others. The apartments, or cells, of the tree had a few decorations and belongings. There was a bed of some moss-like material, some tables not more than six inches off the floor, a tiny stove, some pots, pans and tableware. There was a wooden box, painted by some amateur, in a corner. This held food and various liquids. And that was all.
He left the tree and wandered through the park, which began to fade away. He had a sense of the passage of time. Much time. It was still night when things stabilised. The moon was changing. It evidently had an atmosphere and seas but it did not have the complete-planet look that it had in the world in which he had awakened. Trees, much larger than the sequoia-types, grew all over the land, through which he passed like a ghost. These had a Brobdingnagian central trunk and massive branches that radiated outward and sent down vertical shoots to support them and finally bent to plunge into the earth. They were much smaller versions of The Tree that he knew. They formed small towns, and on them grew trees which furnished all the food, except for meat, that the citizens needed.
There were also trees containing experimental laboratories. These housed cats and dogs with much larger braincases than the animals of his time. And there were monkeys which had lost much of their hair and all of their tail and walked upright. And many more animals that had obviously been mutated by geneticists.
The world began to move fast and then he was on the moon with no sense of transition. The brown Earth hung near the horizon; despite the cloud masses he could recognise the eastern end of Asia.
The moonscape was fair and gentle. There were great trees, many bright plants, birds and little animals. To the east was the first intrusion of dawn. And then the sun came up and lit up the western slope of a mountain—once the wall of a crater, he supposed, that had been softened by erosion of wind and water. Or perhaps it had been changed by the godlike powers of the beings that had given the moon an atmosphere and oceans and transmuted the stony floors to a dark rich soil.
The godlike beings must also have given the moon a faster spin, because the sun rose swiftly and, in an estimated twelve hours, had set again. By then he had scudded across the park-like land and seen the trees that grew here and housed men and many different genera and species of sentients. All the nonhuman peoples, except one, seemed to be descended from terrestrial animals.
The exception was a tall pinkish-skinned biped with kinky hair from the neck up, under the armpits, on the pubic regions, and on the back of his legs. His face was human enough except for the fleshy excrescence, like that of a starnosed mole, which adorned the tip of his retrousse nose. There were many of these beings, obviously visitors from a planet of some distant star. If they had spaceships, there were none in sight.
Ulysses continued to glide like a phantom over the face of the moon and then he went as invisibly and gently as a breeze into a tree that contained a laboratory. And here he saw humans and non-humans watching an experiment. There was an immobile figure inside a plastic transparent cubicle. It was the object of many-coloured fluctuating rays directed from a device like a laser gun. The gun poured out its energies, which penetrated the walls of the cubicle and splashed over the still figure.
He recognised the statue. It was himself.
Apparently, the scientists were trying to restore the natural motion of his atoms.
He knew what success they would have.
But what was he doing on the moon? Had he been loaned to the scientists there for some reason he would never know? If so, he had been shipped back to Earth, though this may not have occurred until thousands of years later.
As abruptly as he had left, he was back on Earth. Not only space had been traversed. Much time had also passed.
The Earth was desolated. Fiery winds wrapped it. The polar caps had melted, and earthquakes, exploding volcanoes, and crumbling coastal masses had changed the face of what land was left.
There was no explanation for what had happened or for what had caused the global holocaust. Possibly, the huge luminous teardrops that tore through the smoke covering the seared earth were the cause. But there was no one to explain. The smoke passed away and the air became clear again except for
great dust storms. Little clots of sentients and the animals that had gone underground with them came out. They sowed seeds, and they cultivated little pieces of ground. Some little trees that had been saved underground were planted.
The teardrops appeared again and hovered over the colonies for a while. None took any action, except one. This loosed energy bolts that burned out the little tree containing the forty survivors of homo sapiens.
The other sentients, the cat-men, dog-men, leopard-men, bear-men, elephant-men, were not harmed. Apparently, whoever was operating the teardrops—unless these were themselves living entities—wanted to exterminate only homo sapiens.
The bat-men were a modified form of homo sapiens, and these too had been killed off.
But when the teardrops left, the bat-men came out of hiding.
Neshgai slaves and the Vroomaw were not human. They had descended from mutated monkeys. This explained why they were not bothered by the teardrops.
He continued to drift across the face of the Earth. Time slipped by, or he slipped by time. Each great land mass now had only one tree. The trees had evolved and those on a landmass met and merged and became one. Each grew and grew. The sentients, one by one, went to live on its surface. The time would come when The Tree would spread across the continent. Only the coastal regions would be free, because salt water inhibited its growth. But The Tree could evolve to overcome this inhibition and would. And then each continental Tree would merge into the other surrendering its individuality through some vegetable mechanism that Ulysses did not understand. It would have one brain, one identity, one body. And it would be the master of the planet. Forever and forever. Amen.
Unless the Neshgai and the stone god could defeat it.
He seemed to step backward out of the disk—a reluctant Alice, he thought.
Afterward, talking to the high priest, he formulated his own theory about the Book of Tiznak. Kuushmurzh had a theological explanation for the strange things that occurred to the readers of the Book. Nesh dictated its contents according to what he thought each reader should find in the Book. But the high priest admitted that his explanation could be wrong. It was not dogma.
Ulysses thought that whoever had made the disk had put into it a recording of the past. This recording probably was not made when the events it depicted occurred. The peculiarity of the Book—one of them—was that it contained what Ulysses could only describe as "resonant points." That is, the individual demands of each Reader brought out in the Book that which interested the Reader. It was the same as picking out a book on a certain historical subject in a library. The Book, working through mental means, detected what the Reader wanted to know and then furnished the information in its fashion.
"That may well be true," the high priest said. He looked with dark blue eyes from under the triple-horned hat at Ulysses. "Your explanation may well fit the facts and yet not conflict at all with the official explanation that Nesh dictated the contents. After all, whoever made the disk did so because Nesh required him to do so."
Ulysses bowed. There was no sense in arguing against this.
"Do you now understand that The Tree is a sentient entity and is our enemy?" Kuushmurzh said.
"The Book told me that this is so."
The high priest smiled and said, "But you do not necessarily believe the Book?"
Ulysses though it best not to answer. He could have said that much of the Book's contents were true, but that the disk was made by sentients, and any creature of flesh and blood could make mistakes or be in error. But the high priest would only reply that the disk could not be wrong, since Nesh had dictated its contents, and Nesh, the only god, could make neither mistake nor error.
When he returned to the airfield, he had changed his attitude toward Thebi. She was no longer the potential mother of his children. He doubted very much that she or any slave or Vroomaw could conceive by him. Though she looked like a slightly altered form of homo sapiens, she probably had a different chromosomal makeup. She would be barren as long as he was her only mate. Enough time had gone by that she had proved that.
Of course, it was possible that she was sterile no matter who her mate was. But Lusha had been with him long enough to conceive, too. Again, it was possible that she, too, was sterile. Or that both women, unknown to him, were secretly using methods of birth control. This did not seem likely, since he had never heard of such among any peoples he had encountered. Fertility was as revered now as in the first Palaeolithic age of Earth.
During the months that followed his first visit to the temple of Nesh, he found some time to make other visits. Though he was not allowed to read the Book of Tiznak again, he could explore the underground city, or museum, as he thought of it. He found many things the purpose of which he figured out, though many were useless because he did not know how to power them. He did find a device which had not evolved so far from those he knew in his time as to be unrecognisable. He took tissue slides of his skin and of a number of slave women and put them in the matcher. The tissues of the slave women turned scarlet when placed next to his. He could not breed with them.
That was that. He pushed aside the device with a feeling of disappointment. Yet, somewhere in him, was a tickling of elation.
He put the faint good feeling aside. It had to go. If he let it build up into something strong, he would then have to suffer guilt.
But why should he? he told himself. He could not help it that he could not be the father of a new breed of humanity. Nor was it vital that Earth know mankind again. Mankind had almost destroyed the Earth. The flying teardrops had made a point of exterminating homo sapiens but had left the other sapient beings alone. Not that they were any less evil potentially. But they had not done anything evil to Earth as of then, and so they had been spared.
Why should he generate his pernicious and destructive breed again?
No reason at all. But he did feel guilty because he was unable to.
He also felt guilty because he preferred Awina to Thebi or any of Thebi's kind.
This explained why he kept Thebi on as his personal servant and then added another human slave. He still called them human, which, in a way, they were. This was a golden-skinned, green-eyed girl called Phanus. She was as bald as any, but her chin was less jutting and her features were very pleasing.
Awina said nothing when Phanus reported to his office. She gave Ulysses a sidelong glance that told him much and made him feel guilty about his treatment of her. To compensate, he put the two women under the immediate supervision of Awina. He might have known that this would make their life, if not a hell, extremely unpleasant at times. But he was too busy with his air force to notice such things for a long time.
The time came, at last, when the first dirigible was finished. The great silvery craft had twelve powerful motors in six nacelles and could carry many men or many bombs or a compromise load of the two. By then, at Ulysses' repeated demands, the quarrel between the navy and the army had been settled. Both had claimed that the aircraft and personnel should come under their jurisdiction. The result was that Ulysses was hampered in getting material, personnel or decisions. Finally, he stormed into the office of the Grand Vizier and demanded that a separate branch be created. Right then and there. Otherwise, there would be so many delays, the enemy would have time to organise another attack. And this would be a fullscale invasion, not a raid.
Shegnif agreed, and made Ulysses the admiral of the fleet, though not head of the air force. He gave this position to his nephew, Graushpaz. Ulysses detested him, but he could do nothing about him. Then his investigation into the cost of the supplies he had been getting, and the inferior quality of much of it, exploded in everybody's face. Shegnif tried to repress the findings of Ulysses' investigators, but Ulysses got the report to the ruler, Zhigbruwzh.
Graushpaz, the nephew, had been selling the air force the inferior goods.
Moreover, a human officer got the courage to come to Ulysses and tell him that the humans in the air force were
about to riot because of the bad food they had been getting. Graushpaz had been selling the food to the air force.
Ulysses agreed to plead for the nephew if there would be no more profiteering and delays.
Shegnif agreed, but he did insist that Graushpaz be kept as head of the air force. Otherwise, Graushpaz would have to commit suicide, and he, Shegnif, would be disgraced.
"Everybody knows that he's guilty!" Ulysses said. "Why isn't he disgraced?"
"Everybody knows, true," Shegnif said. "But unless he is publicly disgraced, he does not have to kill himself."
"I won't put up with any more of his crooked deals," Ulysses said. "And I insist that he not come with us when we go after the Dhulhulikh!"
"He has to go with you," Shegniff said. "That is the only way he can redeem himself. He must do something outstanding in war to make up for being caught."
The Stone God Awakens Page 20
