Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (78 page)

“Now if the lift only works.”

Just as they were making for the lift shaft they were startled by a voice ringing out.

“Ho! Ho, Roland!”

“That’s no voder,” Peachthief whispered. “There’s a live human here.”

They turned back and saw that a strange person was lying half on and half off one of the lounges. As they came close their eyes opened wide: he looked frightful. His thin dirty white hair hung around a horribly creased caved-in face, and what they could see of his neck and arms was all mottled and decayed-looking. His jerkin and pants were frayed and stained and sagged in where flesh should be. Jakko thought of the cloth shreds around dead Ferrocil and shuddered.

The stranger was staring haggardly at them. In a faint voice he said, “When the chevalier Roland died he predicted that his body would be found a spear’s throw ahead of all others and facing the enemy. . . . If you happen to be real, could you perhaps give me some water?”

“Of course.” Jakko unhooked his canteen and tried to hand it over, but the man’s hands shook and fumbled so that Jakko had to hold it to his mouth, noticing a foul odor. The stranger sucked thirstily, spilling some. Beyond him the moondogs inched closer, sniffing gingerly.

“What’s
wrong
with him?” Peachthief whispered as Jakko stood back.

Jakko had been remembering his lessons. “He’s just very, very old, I think.”

“That’s right.” The stranger’s voice was stronger. He stared at them with curious avidity. “I waited too long. Fibrillation.” He put one feeble hand to his chest. “Fibrillating . . . rather a beautiful word, don’t you think? My medicine ran out or I lost it. . . . A small hot animal desynchronizing in my ribs.”

“We’ll help you get to the River right away!” Peachthief told him.

“Too late, my lords, too late. Besides, I can’t walk and you can’t possibly carry me.”

“You can sit up, can’t you?” Jakko asked. “There have to be some roll chairs around here, they had them for injured people.” He went off to search the lounge office and found one almost at once.

When he brought it back the stranger was staring up at Peachthief, mumbling to himself in an archaic tongue of which Jakko only understood: “. . .
The breast of a grave girl makes a hill against sunrise.”
He tried to heave himself up to the chair but fell back, gasping. They had to lift and drag him in, Peachthief wrinkling her nose.

“Now if the lift only works.”

It did. They were soon on the high departure deck, and the fourth portal-berth held a waiting ship. It was a small local ferry. They went through into the windowed main cabin, wheeling the old man, who had collapsed upon himself and was breathing very badly. The moondogs trooped from window to window, looking down. Jakko seated himself in the pilot chair.

“Read me out the instructions,” he told Peachthief.

“One, place ship on internal guidance,” she read. “Whatever that means. Oh, look, here’s a diagram.”

“Good.”

It proved simple. They went together down the list, sealing the port, disengaging umbilicals, checking vane function, reading off the standby pressures in the gasbags above them, setting the reactor to warm up the drive motor and provide hot air for operational buoyancy.

While they were waiting, Peachthief asked the old man if he would like to be moved onto a window couch. He nodded urgently. When they got him to it he whispered, “See out!” They propped him up with chair pillows.

The ready-light was flashing. Jakko moved the controls, and the ship glided smoothly out and up. The computer was showing him wind speed, altitude, climb, and someone had marked all the verniers with the words COURSE SET—RIVER. Jakko lined everything up.

“Now it says, put it on automatic,” Peachthief read. He did so.

The takeoff had excited the old man. He was straining to look down, muttering incomprehensibly. Jakko caught, “
The cool green hills of Earth
. . . Crap!” Suddenly he sang out loudly,
“There’s a hell of a good universe next door—let’s go!”
And fell back exhausted.

Peachthief stood over him worriedly. “I wish I could at least clean him up, but he’s so weak.”

The old man’s eyes opened.

“Nothing shall be whole and sound that has not been rent; for love hath built his mansion in the place of excrement.”
He began to sing crackedly, “Take me to the River, the bee-yew-tiful River, and wash all my sins a-away! . . . You think I’m crazy, girl, don’t you?” he went on conversationally. “Never heard of William Yeats. Very high bit-rate, Yeats.”

“I think I understand a little,” Jakko told him. “One of my aunts did English literature.”

“
Did
literature, eh?” The stranger wheezed, snorted. “And you two—going on the River to spend eternity together as energy matrices or something equally impressive and sexless. . . .
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair
.” He grunted. “Always mistrusted Keats. No balls. He’d be right at home.”

“We’re not going on the River,” Peachthief said. “At least, I’m not. I’m going to stay and make children.”

The old man’s ruined mouth fell open; he gazed up at her wildly.

“No!” he breathed. “Is it true? Have I stumbled on the lover and mother of man, the last?”

Peachthief nodded solemnly.

“What is your name, O Queen?”

“Peachthief.”

“My god. Somebody still knows of Blake.” He smiled tremulously, and his eyelids suddenly slid downward; he was asleep.

“He’s breathing better. Let’s explore.”

The small ship held little but cargo space at the rear. When they came to the food-synthesizer cubby Jakko saw Peachthief pocket something.

“What’s that?”

“A little spoon. It’ll be just right for a child.” She didn’t look at him.

Back in the main cabin the sunset was flooding the Earth below with level roseate light. They were crossing huge, oddly pockmarked meadows, the airship whispering along in silence except when a jet whistled briefly now and then for a course correction.

“Look—cows! Those must be cows,” Peachthief exclaimed. “See the shadows.”

Jakko made out small tan specks that were animals, with grotesque horned shadows stretching away.

“I’ll have to find them when I come back. What is this place?”

“A big deathyard, I think. Where they put dead bodies. I never saw one this size. In some cities they had buildings just for dead people. Won’t all that poison the cows?”

“Oh, no, it makes good grass, I believe. The dogs will help me find them. Won’t you, Tycho?” she asked the biggest moondog, who was looking down beside them.

On the eastern side of the cabin the full moon was rising into view. The old man’s eyes opened, looking at it.

“More water, if you please,” he croaked.

Peachthief gave him some, and then got him to swallow broth from the synthesizer. He seemed stronger, smiling at her with his mouthful of rotted teeth.

“Tell me, girl. If you’re going to stay and make children, why are you going to the River?”

“He’s going because he promised to talk to his father, and I’m going along to see he comes back. And make the baby. Only now he won’t take any more pills, I have to try to find another man.”

“Ah yes, the pills. We used to call them Wake-ups. . . . They were necessary, after the population chemicals got around. Maybe they still are, for women. But I think it’s mostly in the head. Why won’t you take any more, boy? What’s wrong with the old Adam?”

Peachthief started to answer, but Jakko cut her off. “I can speak for myself. They upset me. They made me do bad, uncontrolled things, and feel, agh—” He broke off with a grimace.

“You seem curiously feisty, for one who values his calm above the continuance of the race.”

“It’s the pills, I tell you. They’re—they’re dehumanizing.”

“Dee-humanizing,” the old man mocked. “And what do you know of humanity, young one? . . . That’s what I went to find, that’s why I stayed so long among the old, old things from before the River came. I wanted to bring the knowledge of what humanity really was . . . I wanted to bring it all. It’s simple, boy.
They died
.” He drew a rasping breath. “Every one of them died. They lived knowing that nothing but loss and suffering and extinction lay ahead. And they cared, terribly. . . . Oh, they made myths, but not many really believed them.
Death
was behind everything, waiting everywhere. Aging and death. No escape . . . Some of them went crazy, they fought and killed and enslaved each other by the millions, as if they could gain more life. Some of them gave up their precious lives for each other. They loved—and had to watch the ones they loved age and die. And in their pain and despair they built, they struggled, some of them sang. But above all, boy, they copulated! Fornicated, fucked, made love!”

He fell back, coughing, glaring at Jakko. Then, seeing that they scarcely understood his antique words, he went on more clearly. “Did sex, do you understand? Made children. It was their only weapon, you see. To send something of themselves into the future beyond their own deaths. Death was the engine of their lives, death fueled their sexuality. Death drove them at each other’s throats and into each other’s arms. Dying, they triumphed. . . .
That
was human life. And now that mighty engine is long stilled, and you call this polite parade of immortal lemmings
humanity
? . . . Even the faintest warmth of that immemorial holocaust makes you flinch away?”

He collapsed, gasping horribly; spittle ran down his chin. One slit of eye still raked them.

Jakko stood silent, shaken by resonances from the old man’s words, remembering dead Ferrocil, feeling some deep conduit of reality reaching for him out of the long-gone past. Peachthief’s hand fell on his shoulder, sending a shudder through him. Slowly his own hand seemed to lift by itself and cover hers, holding her to him. They watched the old man so for a long moment. His face slowly composed, he spoke in a soft dry tone.

“I don’t trust that River, you know. . . . You think you’re going to remain yourselves, don’t you? Communicate with each other and with the essences of beings from other stars? . . . The latest news from Betelgeuse.” He chuckled raspingly.

“That’s the last thing people say when they’re going,” Jakko replied. “Everyone learns that. You float out, able to talk with real other beings. Free to move.”

“What could better match our dreams?” He chuckled again. “I wonder . . . could that be the lure, just the input end of some cosmic sausage machine . . . ?”

“What’s that?” asked Peachthief.

“An old machine that ground different meats together until they came out as one substance. . . . Maybe you’ll find yourselves gradually mixed and minced and blended into some-some energic plasma . . . and then maybe squirted out again to impose the terrible gift of consciousness on some innocent race of crocodiles, or poached eggs. . . . And so it begins all over again. Another random engine of the universe, giving and taking obliviously. . . .” He coughed, no longer looking at them, and began to murmur in the archaic tongue,
“Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken, confusion of the deathbed over, is it sent
. . .
out naked on the roads as the books say, and stricken with the injustice of the stars for punishment?
The injustice of the stars . . .” He fell silent, and then whispered faintly, “Yet I too long to go.”

“You will,” Peachthief told him strongly.

“How . . . much longer?”

“We’ll be there by dawn,” Jakko said. “We’ll carry you. I swear.”

“A great gift,” he said weakly. “But I fear . . . I shall give you a better.” He mumbled on, a word Jakko didn’t know; it sounded like “afrodisiack.”

He seemed to lapse into sleep then. Peachthief went and got a damp, fragrant cloth from the cleanup and wiped his face gently. He opened one eye and grinned up at her.

“Madame Tasselass,” he rasped. “Madame Tasselass, are you really going to save us?”

She smiled down, nodding her head determinedly, yes. He closed his eyes, looking more peaceful.

The ship was now fleeing through full moonlight, the cabin was so lit with azure and silver that they didn’t think to turn on lights. Now and again the luminous mists of a low cloud veiled the windows and vanished again. Just as Jakko was about to propose eating, the old man took several gulping breaths and opened his eyes. His intestines made a bubbling sound.

Peachthief looked at him sharply and picked up one of his wrists. Then she frowned and bent over him, opening his filthy jerkin. She laid her ear to his chest, staring up at Jakko.

“He’s not breathing, there’s no heartbeat!” She groped inside his jerkin as if she could locate life, two tears rolling down her cheeks.

“He’s dead—ohhh!” She groped deeper, then suddenly straightened up and gingerly clutched the cloth at the old man’s crotch.

“What?”

“He’s a woman!” She gave a sob and wheeled around to clutch Jakko, putting her forehead in his neck. “We n-never even knew her name. . . .”

Jakko held her, looking at the dead man-woman, thinking, She never knew mine, either. At that moment the airship jolted, and gave a noise like a cable grinding or slipping before it flew smoothly on again.

Jakko had never in his life distrusted machinery, but now a sudden terror contracted his guts. This thing could fall! They could be made dead like Ferrocil, like this stranger, like the myriads in the deathyards below. Echoes of the old voice ranting about death boomed in his head, he had a sudden vision of Peachthief grown old and dying like that. After the Rivers went, dying alone. His eyes filled, and a deep turmoil erupted under his mind. He hugged Peachthief tighter. Suddenly he knew in a dreamlike way exactly what was about to happen. Only this time there was no frenzy; his body felt like warm living rock.

He stroked Peachthief to quiet her sobs, and led her over to the moonlit couch on the far side of the cabin. She was still sniffling, hugging him hard. He ran his hands firmly down her back, caressing her buttocks, feeling her body respond.

“Give me that pill,” he said to her. “Now.”