Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (71 page)

He felt unbodied, weightless with exaltation and relief. Pain gouted and wrenched at him from below, but he was remote from the pounding, crashing, bellowing all about. It came to him that he was quite probably dying.

As he thought it he felt also a wave of weakness from the entity in his arms. This was killing them both.

So be it.

Another herd of horrors showed now through the smoke ahead. He reached for them from far, found the frail potency, fought, felt them shift, go slewwise. Wind blew the smoke flat.

He realized he was seeing the true horizon, almost empty now. The main herd was past.

Ahead of him on the wall, men wrestled torches toward the slippery crest. No one was near him. He found he was sobbing or screaming when he breathed, but he could not hear himself. Memory brushed him: a boy—had it been one of his sons?—had pawed at him, gone away.

He managed to twist agonizingly on his elbows so that he could look back at the colony.

Yes, there was more damage. The hideous bulk of a cow reared among the dormitories, shedding timbers. But it was still safe. Still safe! His last gift had saved them, his dying had given life to all he held dear. Cocooned in deafness he let his gaze go out to the beloved scene. Still so beautiful, despite the smoke! Golden figures ran as if playing a game. His nest, his life—

His life. Not the stars; this . . .

Why had the scene changed subtly, as if transparency had congealed around it, turning it into something curious and tiny like a toy in plastic? His lifework. The species lives, I die. The operative words,
I die.
Die, he thought, like a faithful ant whose nest lives on. Like those dying head-husks capering to the sea. Only that more may breed and die, to breed and die. The building, the breeding, the towers raised and fallen, without end. Disgust chilled him. For this I have forsaken—

Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man.

His traitor soul gasping, he fighting, fainting. Was it possible that a man could strive with his whole heart all his life for his kind, his young—and at the last turn away? It is my body’s dying, only that, he told himself. In the end the brain goes.

He made himself turn back, peer.

They were still coming. One more assault. The last, the last ones. It was so dark here. Or was the day ending? All over by nightfall.

Here they come. This one will kill us.

Good, he thought, good! Faithful ant. Forget the soul’s weak protest. Those who come after can perhaps—No time. He groped inwardly, eyes closed, for the channel, the focus . . . and felt nothing.

Noion!

Faint in his mind: “You need . . . this?”

“Yes, yes!” he shouted into the roaring. Oh, god, no time—the beasts were at the wall.

“Yes!” he screamed again, forcing himself to feel, to clench his need into the power, to touch, reach—ah! There! It came, it was there, the help, the opening—the
noion
was with him. He felt the beasts’ lives now, touched. Turn, turn, turn!
Turn
with my last strength, with my death that I give freely!
TURN with my death that I did not need to die—

The contact faded, was gone.

He opened his eyes.

A tower of armor was bulging through the murk above him, the rock he clung to tilted, slipped.

They had not turned.

They had breached the wall. An avalanche of piling was falling on his inshore side, the thunderous wake rocked his crib. And in the bay, on the beach, blotting out the colony from his horror-filled eyes—

“Noion! Noion!”
He screamed, his death suspended over him, rushing in stasis—he knowing what had happened, what he had done. His need, his desire at the end, had not held true—he had betrayed them back to the jungle, to the running and the dust. His human heart, his soul, had betrayed them all—

“Noion!”
his soul shouted. “Take me! Give me the other, give me back myself!”

But the life against his chest was draining, going away. Too late. Too late. All wasted. He felt the wraith-wind of its going in his brain, the alien immensities opening to the imago. Opening—for an instant it was as if the
noion
were still holding a way open, offering to share its dying with him if he could. The longing rose in him, the terrified love toward what he could not imagine—
O rich and sounding voices of the air—I come! I come!—

—But he could not alone, no, and his useless death hung over him, the crashing was beating on his mortal ears. His lips moved, crying, “Man is the, is the, that—”

A vast impersonal tonnage fell upon him and the stars raveled away from his brain.

SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN

Pale, beyond porch and portal
,

Crowned with calm leaves, she stands

Who gathers all things mortal

With cold immortal hands

—S
WINBURNE

I
N THE WASTES
of nonbeing it is born, flickers out, is born again and holds together, swells and spreads
.
In lifelessness it lives, against the gray tide of entropy it strives, improbably persists, gathering itself into ever richer complexities until it grows as a swelling wave
.
As a wave grows it grows indeed, for while its crest surges triumphant in the sunlight its every particle is down falling forever into dark, is blown away into nothing in the moment of its leap
.
It triumphs perishing, for it was not born alone
.
Following it into being came its dark twin, its Adversary, the shadow which ceaselessly devours it from within
.
Pitilessly pursued, attacked in every vital, the living wave foams upward, its billion momentary crests blooming into the light above the pain and death that claims them
.
Over uncounted eons the mortal substance strives, outreaches
.
Death-driven, it flees ever more swiftly before its Enemy until it runs, leaps, soars, into flashing flight
.
But it cannot outrace the fire in its flesh, for the limbs that bear it are Death, and Death is the wing it flies on
.
In the agony of its myriad members, victorious and dying, Life drives upon the indifferent air
. . ..

The burrow is dark. Pelicosaurus squats over her half-grown pups, her dim node of awareness holding only the sensation of their muzzles sucking the glandular skin of her belly among her not-quite hair. From outside comes a thunderous eructation, splashing. The burrow quakes. Pelicosaurus crouches, rigid; the huddled pups freeze. All but one—a large female pup has squirmed free, is nosing nervously toward the recesses of the burrow. She moves in a half-crawl, her body slung from the weak reptilian shoulder girdle.

More crashes outside. Earth showers down within the damp nest. The mother only crouches tighter, locked in reflexive stasis. The forgotten pup is now crawling away up a tunnel.

As she vanishes, the giant hadrosaur in the stream outside decides to clamber out. Twenty tons of reptile hit the soft bank. Earth, rocks, and roots slam together, crushing Pelicosaurus and her pups and all other bank-dwellers into an earthy gel, a trough of destruction behind the departing one. Leather wings clap; pterosaurs are gathering to stab in the wreckage.

Farther up the bank beside a gymnosperm root, the lone pup wriggles free. She cowers, hearing the hoarse grunts of the scavengers. Then an obscure tropism rises in her, an undefined urge toward space, toward up. Awkwardly she grips the bole of the gymnosperm with her forelimbs. A grub moves on the bark. Automatically she seizes and eats it, her eyes blinking as she strives to focus beyond. Presently she begins to clamber higher, carrying, in the intricacy of her genes, the tiny anomaly which has saved her. In the egg from which she grew, a molecule has imperceptibly shifted structure. From its aberrant program has unfolded a minute relaxation of the species-wide command to freeze, a small tendency to action under stress. The pup that is no longer wholly Pelicosaur feels her ill-adapted hind limb slip upon the branch, scrabbles for purchase, falls, and crawls weakly from the graveyard of her kind.

. . .
So the wave of Life mounts under the lash of Death, grows, gathers force in unbounded diversity
.
Ever-perishing, ever-resurgent, it foams to higher, more complex victories upon the avalanche of its corpses
.
As a wave swells, it surges, swarming, striving ever more strongly, achieving ever more intricate strategies of evasion, flinging itself in wilder trajectories to escape its pain
.
But it bears its Enemy within it, for Death is the power of its uprush
.
Dying in every member, yet every moment renewed, the multiple-hearted wave of Life crests into strangeness
. . ..

Yelling, the hairless creature runs swiftly, knuckles to earth, and screams again as a rock strikes him. He swerves and scuttles, limping now; he is unable to avoid the hail of missiles flung by those stronger, more freely jointed arms. His head is struck. He goes down. The bipeds close around him. Shouting in still wordless joy, they fall upon their brother with thin jaws and sharpened stones.

. . .
The living, dying tumult mounts, fountains into culminant light
.
Its billion tormented fragments take on intenser being; it leaps as a great beast above the ravenings of its Adversary
.
But it cannot shake free, for the force of its life is Death, and its strength is as the strength of the deaths that consume it, its every particle is propelled by the potency of the dark Assailant
.
In the measure of its dying, Life towers, triumphs, and rolls resistless across the planet that bore it
. . ..

Two horsemen move slowly across the plain under the cold autumn rain. The first is a young boy on a spotted pony; he is leading a black-eared roan on which his father is riding slumped, breathing open-mouthed above the rifle-ball in his chest. The man’s hand holds a bow, but there are no arrows. The Kiowas’ stores and supplies were lost at Palo Duro Canyon, and the last arrows were fired in the slaughter at the Staked Plains three days back, where his wife and oldest son were killed.

As they pass a copse of willows the rain eases for a moment. Now they can see the white man’s buildings ahead: Fort Sill with its gray stone corral. Into that corral their friends and relatives have vanished, family by family, surrendering to their merciless enemy. The boy halts his pony. He can see a column of soldiers riding out of the fort. Beside him his father makes a sound, tries to raise his bow. The boy licks his lips; he has not eaten for three days. Slowly he urges his pony forward again.

As they ride on, faint sounds of firing come to them on the wet wind, from a field west of the fort. The white men are shooting the Kiowas’ horses, destroying the life of their life. For the Kiowas, this is the end. They were among the finest horsemen the world has ever known, and war was their sacred occupation. Three centuries before, they had come down out of the dark mountains, had acquired horses and a god and burst out in glory to rule a thousand miles of range. But they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. Now they are finished.

The Kiowas have been toughened by natural hardship, by millennia of death in the wilderness. But their death-strength is not enough. The pale soldiers before them are the survivors of more deadly centuries in the caldrons of Europe; they drive upon the Indians with the might derived from uncountable generations of close-quarter murder in battle, deaths under merciless tyrannies, by famines and plagues. As has happened before and before and before, the gray-faced children of the greater death roll forward, conquer and spread out across the land.

. . .
So the great Beast storms among the flames that devour it, the myriad lives of its being a crucible of always fiercer deaths and more ascendant life
.
And now its agonized onrush changes
.
What had been flight becomes battle
.
The Beast turns on the enemy that savages it and strives to cast Death from its heart
.
Desperately it struggles; streaming from the wounds that are its life, it fights to save some fragment while Death slays whole members
.
For Death is the twin of its essence, growing as Life grows, and the fury of its attack mounts with the power that attacks it
.
Locked into intimate battle, the Beast and its Enemy are now nearing a consummating phase of pain
.
The struggle rages, breaches the norms of matter
.
Time accelerates
. . ..

As night comes over the Mediterranean the battered freighter limps warily past the enemy ears on Cyprus. Rain and darkness hide it; it creeps with all lights extinguished, every human sound quenched. Only the throbbing of its engines and the thrashing of its rusty screw remain to betray it to the blockaders. In its body is the precious cargo, the huddled silent sparks of life. The children. The living ones, the handfuls saved from the six million corpses of the death camps, saved from the twenty million killed by the Reich. In darkness and desperation it crawls on, leaking, the crew not daring to work the creaking pumps. Hidden by the night it steams mile by daring mile through the gauntlet of the blockade, carrying the children to Palestine.