The light in and about him faded and died. The vast concourse of humanity vanished.
He was alone, utterly alone in all the universe. There was not another creature in existence. Dreamless and at peace he floated in the vast void that stretched between creations his mind could not grasp.
He began to laugh. This was a stupid, an impossible existence. He, therefore, had ceased to exist. But he had had existence a moment before— The moment before—he couldn’t remember it. There was no moment before. He was in eternity and there is no before eternity.
His laughter shook the light spangled vault that encompassed him. It undulated the space in which he floated and he began to rise and fall—rise and fall—in increasing waves that swelled to prodigious amplitude. Waves that flung him from one end of the universe to the other and turned him, smashing and shattering great incomprehensible suns and destroying worlds in vast sweeps.
And then he burst the expanding wave and plummeted through other times and other universes, borne on the mad explosion of a creation.
His vision congealed. His feet were pumping slowly up and down, slogging through deep, wind-blown sand. From horizon to horizon there was only sand, white-hot sand that reflected the light of a single globe in searing radiance.
In the midst of the desert there rose a great towering pinnacle of rock. A shaft of salvation. He must get to that rock. His life depended on it. The life of Kronweld—he paused a moment and struggled to recall what the word meant—Kronweld depended on it. He must reach that pinnacle in the blinding sands.
XV.
Awakening came like a birth, like that other birth Ketan had known eons ago when he first came into the sunlight out of the golden doors of the Temple. As then, the sun was now blinding his eyes and the physical reality of the world attacked him with a thousand spears.
lie shut his eyes against the impact of the blue sky and the globe tli.it rode high upon it. But the whispering of the wind was thunder in his can. The breath of it was like ice laid across his face, and the rough ground on which he lay tortured the sensitiveness of his flesh.
He opened his eyes cautiously. Whatever nameless existence this might be it was surely not life, nor was this realm Kronweld. He was quite sure that it was not life, yet was there perception in death ?
He lay back again and closed his eyes. When he opened them once more, the light in the sky was less and the wind was colder. There was another sound that had impinged upon his senses during the endless era he had lain there, but only now did he understand it. Once before, in Dark Land, he had heard such a sound, the rushing of a mighty stream of water, such as was never known in Kronweld.
Slowly he raised upon his arms and felt the dullness slipping from his mind like a drawn curtain. He was aware of hiniseif, of his own identity once more. Gradually it came back, that last fantastic dream of thundering down eons and across infinity. But it was no dream. His mind jerked back to the reality of the Chamber of Birth.
Elta.
He remembered she was coming with him to—wherever he was. But she had not been *at the watcher’s seat as she had promised. She had been caught, perhaps slain, for her attack on Anetel.
Uselessness and futility took hold of him as it had done before when Elta had gone to Preparation Center and he had thought her lost. Only this time there was no way back for him. No way back to Kronweld. No way back to Elta.
The ecstasy of attainment of his goal of passing through the great Edge was lost and dimmed by his overwhelming loneliness.
He turned slowly and sat upright. He was in the midst of - a forest. There was no sign of house or structure or life. There was no sign of the vast concourse of pleading faces he had seen through the gateway in the Edge. There was no sign of the great Edge itself, nor yet of the desert and the pinnacle.
Never had he seen such a forest as this. Trees there were in Dark Land, but in the dark and cold, and under the smoke hidden skies they were small and feeble things. The towering columns above and about him now were terrifying as he looked up between them and watched their far tips sway against the sky. A sense of vertigo spun his vision.
He wondered where he was. It was an utterly meaningless question. He was in a special, self-centered, self-created world where he alone would live and die. He wanted to lie back down, but his tortured senses protested further contemplation. He rose and began walking to drive the wonder and terror out of his. mind. Driving his feet onward, stepping over stones and branches and guiding his way through the trees reduced his tortured self-questioning.
He found himself descending a slope and the sound of flowing water became louder. In a moment he could see the stream. He stared in fascination, It was a thing of clear beauty, No man of Kronweld had ever before seen such a thing. Water there came only from stagnant, hot pools and had to be artificially cooled. When he advanced and touched his hand in this stream, it was icy.
He drank deeply and resumed his slow picking of a pathway along the bank. He was increasingly conscious of hunger. He wondered if there were Bors or other beasts here as in Dark Land that might be eaten, but he had no weapons.
After a time, the forest began to recede and widen, more sandy beaches lined each side of the stream before they sloped sharply to rocky crags above him.
The sky grew darker as he went down the widening shore. There was no purpose in his mind, only to keep driving his feet and keep his mind from asking questions.
There came a sound that must have been repeated a dozen times before his reluctant senses answered. He stopped and listened. It was a whimpering, crying sound that became a sudden shrill scream. He thought of the Place of Dying in Kronweld where the injured and sick who refused self-death were taken. He had been told that such sounds were heard in the Place.
He hurried his steps. And then he heard a faint rustling in the sand behind him. He turned just in time to see a dirty, ragged creature leap with madness in his eyes. Then a thick arm closed about Ketan’s throat and crushed until blackness spattered his vision.
Ketan did not know when the life crushing force was released. He was only aware of returning light to his vision and the dim, far away sound of the stream.
And there was another sound, a heavy, incredulous muttering flowed to his ears.
He struggled to a sitting position. The man who had attacked was sitting up on the ground before Ketan. He stared »< amazement.
Then Ketan realized the man was deceived by his woman’s disguise.
The man was thick and dark with hairy arms and chest exposed by ragged garments. I lis face was black with matted beard, but his haggard eyes were young and sharpness still gleamed from them. They stared at Ketan as if to pierce him from beneath their deep cavities that undercut a long, high forehead.
Behind him, Ketan closed his hand on a sharp rock that lay beside the stream. The man opened his mouth in unintelligible mutterings again, and Ketan moved.
His arm whipped around and burled the rock straight to the man’s forehead. There was an instant of surprised pain on the bearded face. Then the man tumbled backwards without a sound. Blood slowly seeped out of the wound and made pools of bis eyes and drained into his black beard.
Ketan was sick. The sight of human blood flowing was more than the ordinary Seeker of Kronweld could endure. It was something to bring terror and nausea to the strongest of men.
He rose with a jerky, unnerved motion and hurried away without a backward glance. lie was trembling in every muscle.
Then there came that scream of pain and terror once more.
He looked about wildly for its source, but nothing was visible. After a moment he became aware of the smoky haze drifting upon the air and noticed for the first time a low, smoking fire on the beach
ahead near the hillside. A narrow mouthed cavern was in the hill directly behind it.
Instinctively, he knew the cry had come from that cave.
If this were a Place of Dying, he wished to avoid it as widely as possible. Imbued all his
life with a horror of defective human mechanism, and taught that the only remedy for damage to a body was death, Ketan shrank from the source of those cries that shrilled out upon the air.
Yet there were a group of Seekers in Kronweld, and Ketan had long sympathized with them, who believed that it was inhuman and unnecessary for a human being to die or be killed for some small injury. They believed that human repair was possible.
He shrank back from the approach to the cave, but an inherent compassion drew him on. The sound wras like that of a woman in pain. He trudged through the light sand towards the cave mouth.
In the dimness within the cavern he could distinguish nothing. But there was someone there. A voice cried out as he stood in the opening. He entered and stood still, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the dim emission of a light that came from a far corner. He saw that it was a smoking wick suspended in a dish of grease.
When he could see at last he surveyed the cavern. Before him, on a low piled bed of spring)’ tree branches was a woman thrashing about in pain. She was trying to reach a bottle standing in a niche in the far wall of the cavern. Ketan reached for it and gave it to her.
She looked at him gratefully from glazed eyes, not comprehending his strangeness. She kept crying out a single word as if calling a name.
There was a piece of dirty rag in her hand which she was moisten-‘ing with the contents of a bottle. Ketan recognized the pungent odor. She put the rag to her nostrils, breathing deeply, He saw then. She was taking the self-death. He had no right to be there. He rose to leave, but a Seeking curiosity made him wonder why she was there, who she was. Where was the city and the home she had come from?
She had subsided now and the cloth fell from her face. He bent down to replace it so that she might die quickly. As he did so, he saw that her half uncovered body was horribly swollen and distended. He shrank back from the ghastly disfigurement. Never in Kronweld had such a condition been known.
Dimly, a recollection and faint, unbelievable comprehension came. Once—once before he had seen such a condition. The pores of his skin opened and cold sweat oozed through the plastic that covered him.
He had seen it once before.
The Bors.
He snatched the soaked rag from her face and peered closely. She must not die.
Her breath was coming hard and slowly. Ketan felt helpless and bewildered. The goal of all his Seeking seemed within reach and there was nothing he knew to do.
He looked up suddenly as the opening of the cavern was darkened by a wavering shadow that reeled across it. It was made by the man he had left for dead.
Perhaps he did not see Ketan at first in the dimness of the cave for his eyes were not upon him. He staggered across the floor and dropped beside the bed of piled branches.
“Mary!” he cried the single word.
Then he saw Ketan across the bed. He uttered a wild bellow of rage and started to rise, but his glance fell upon the bottle beside Ketan and the cloth in his hand, and went back to the woman.
Slowly, his face softened. A smile of gratitude broke upon its bleakness. He reached out a hand. Hesitatingly, Ketan looked down at it, then extended his own in half understood response.
The questioning contemplation rose in Ketan’s mind again. Who were these two? And what land was this? Perhaps it was beyond Dark Land. No man had ever penetrated beyond those far borders. There was only an impenetrable morass of steaming, boiling swamps where nightmare creations of life swam and flew.
For a moment he considered the possibility that he had simply passed through the Edge and had fallen into the barren land spoken of by Anetel. But there was no Edge here, nor did this resemble the land described by her fantastic explanation of the Temple of Birth.
He dismissed the problem. It was trivial beside the momentous occurrence before him. The climax of his Seeking had come. The proof of his heretical theory of life was at hand.
The man across the bed stood up suddenly and motioned Ketan outside. He followed. In the dimming light of day the two stood appraising each other in mutual wonderment. All the while, the ragged, bearded man looked nervously about as if afraid of some unseen pursuer. His tense anxiety transmitted itself to Ketan.
He spoke a brief sentence that sounded like a command, utterly unintelligible to Ketan. Yet something about it struck a weird chord of familiarity. The intonation and the uniting of many basic sounds were the same as in his own language. Still, the words had no meaning to him.
In disgust, the weary, haggard dweller of the cave saw that he didn’t understand. He gave up and threw an armful of wood on the fire that was burning before the mouth of the cave. Then he brought out a bundle of stained scraps of cloth and surveyed them in dismay and resignation. He took a short pole from the woodpile and thrust the end into the fire until it began to burn, then drew it quickly out and stuck it upright in the sand.
With a pair of smaller sticks he lifted a rag and held it arm’s length away from him over the fire. He let it remain until it began to scorch. Then he draped it on the charred end of the upright pole.
He motioned Ketan to do that with the remainder of the rags. Ketan obeyed, wandering what was the purpose of the mysterious charring of the rags. Perhaps some useless superstition to placate the God. Such was not unknown in Kronweld.
The other man dragged forward a large pot which he erected on supports. With smaller containers, he brought water from the stream, and then built a huge fire beneath the pot and watched impatiently as it slowly heated and boiled.
As a final preparation he brought out a sharp edged knife and held it in the flames, then quickly wrapped it in one of the scorched rags. Lastly, he tied a cloth about his face and washed his hands violently in water and sand and immersed them for a long time in painfully hot water and held them over the flames. Drying, he wrapped his hands in squares of the cloth. All this he indicated to Ketan to imitate.
Low moanings and steadily increasing cries that chilled Ketan had been coming from the cavern. The two hurried in.
The woman was moving about in wild agony. The man uttered a low, cursing sound from his throat and drew her back to the center of the bed. He moistened the cloth further with the liquid in the bottle and applied a touch of it to her nostrils. He motioned Ketan to hold her arms and keep her pinned down. Ketan obeyed, hardly able to look upon her monstrous, distorted form.
In a sickening wave of nausea that rendered him half conscious, he obeyed the motioned instructions of the bearded man. But they were few. He was working in a tight frenzy of fear. It transmitted itself to Ketan. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was. He realized only a great fear and terror that filled the small confines of the cave and seemed to be drawing his life out slowly with each breath.
An eternity of time passed. The woman shuddered beneath Ketan’s hands, but it was becoming fainter. Then the man rose to his feet, holding a tiny, red animal form. He spanked it smartly and held its mouth to his and breathed long and slowly.
A haze seemed to swirl about Ketan and surged over him. His life-long conditioning to revulsion at biological manifestations had not been even partially overcome by his own unregistered investigations and his experience with the Bors.
This was birth. This was the beginning of life. Somewhere at his own beginning, there had been just such a scene. Somewhere there might yet be the woman who had contained him. What horror it would be to meet her and know—
He understood the reaction of the members of the First Group when he had spoken of this thing.
Yet there was another, unknown feeling that tempered his revulsion. In a world where all men knew how
they were created, there could not be universal ignorance of those by whom they were given life. He wondered fleetingly what kind of a world that would be, what kind of relationships would exist between people in such a world.
He let his glance fall upon the bearded man who held the tiny human. There were only worry, fear, and something Ketan cou
ld not name registered on the man’s face.
Ketan thought of Elta and shuddered.
He felt a sudden change in the woman whose arms he held still tightly upon the bough bed. She jerked convulsively. Then she was still. He looked at her quiet, distorted face and felt for her breathing and the beating of her heart.
Slowly, in fascinated horror, he drew away. It was as if her flesh had turned to some alien substance. For the second time he had watched a human being die. After a timeless age a single thought swept through his brain. It was of Elta. Did a life always mean a death?
His glance went to the bearded man who was standing like a stone image, the red little form hanging loosely in his arms.
They remained thus for an indeterminate time. There was no sound but the faint, faraway bubbling of the stream and the occasional crackling of the smoking grease that gave them light.
The stillness was broken by the sharp cry of anguish that came from the tattered, bearded man. He dropped. the still body from his arms and sank beside the two lifeless figures, burying his head upon the woman’s breast.
Ketan walked slowly from the cavern to the glistening stream. The globe was at the base of the sky and shadows leaped out in long, dark fingers from the tops of the trees.
A freezing chill was in the air, something almost unknown to Ketan. But there was more that made his body tremble. He had seen death again.
And the newly created life— what had become of it? There had never been life there. Something was horribly wrong. Surely such things were not meant to be. The creation of life could not mean such terror and death as the woman had suffered—and such sorrow as he had felt welling out of the man.
There was a step behind him. He turned upon the man. The dark burning eyes stared out at him half seeing, but the thick, shaggy arm that beckoned was not to be withstood. Ketan followed him back to the cave.
Inside, he indicated that Ketan was to wrap the dead bodies with the few rags and coverings that were available. Somehow, Ketan felt glad to be able to help him, though he had no idea what purpose lay behind this.
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