The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (34 page)

Gibbering with excitement, Pew fumbled at the rope, freed himself and set off across the broken ground at a shambling run.
 

The Girl gathered in the loose end of the rope, hardly aware of what she was doing, hardly aware that she was free. She closed her eyes and lay there quietly. There was no urgency anymore; she couldn’t see the rock now.
 

And out there across the valley, Pew’s excitement was gradually changing to rage. He quested this way and that, tripping over rocks as his precognition failed him, hugging boulders, only to reject them, slashing with his stick. In the end he gave one roar, then in ominous silence began to tap his way back to the Girl.
 

She lay with eyes closed tightly, listening to the crunch of feet on gravel, the ringing of stick on rock, the steps gradually coming closer, and she didn’t dare look. She felt a hardness against her back as she pressed herself against an overhanging boulder. Her thumb crept into her mouth and she made little cooing noises of absolute terror as the centuries dropped away from her, leaving her a defenseless, crying baby in the unforgiving harshness of the Land of Lost Dreams.
 

And Pew drew near. He was deathly quiet. No shouting, not even the pant of his breath. Just the tap-tap of his stick on rock, and those footsteps, crunching close.
 

He stopped. There was no sound anywhere in the land, just a giant waiting silence.
 

And then the tapping started again, and the footsteps crunched. But this time they were receding, going away, disappearing.
 

Where in hell have they gone?” grumbled Zozula after he’d searched the immediate vicinity. “They ought to have more sense than to wander off like that. And the Girl was sick, too. They’ll get lost, without me to show them the way.”
 

“I’m still here,” said Roller.
 

“You and I are going to have to leave, dog. I must get back to the console and try to locate them. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. Perhaps the poison from the May Bees affected them both.”
 

The dog said, “They died and became spirits.”
 

“Nonsense!”
 

“They did!” The dog danced his front feet in frustration. “I saw it! They got up and walked away into the night mist, and never came back. If that isn’t dying I don’t know what is.” “All right. Have it your own way. Now, you’ll show me the way to the Train, dog, and none of your excuses.”
 

The dog led Zozula in a direction he judged to be north, through barren dusty valleys, beside dried-up watercourses. As they walked, the hills on either side became steeper and the ground beneath their feet more level. The curve of the sky flattened out so that they seemed to be walking in a box. It was an eerie sensation, and after a while Zozula questioned the dog.
 

“Are you sure this is the way?”
 

“Of course I’m sure,” Roller replied. “Do you think I can’t recognize my own master’s handiwork?”
 

Now they were approaching a vertical slit where the valley walls converged. The dog bounded forward. His spirits had been rising steadily ever since the ground had hardened to a smooth glassiness. “My master makes it easy for me, you see!” he cried. “When I’m in his land, my wheels don’t bog down and I don’t have to climb hills. That’s why I love him!”
 

The rock face was glassy smooth too, as Zozula observed when he squeezed through the crevice after the dog. Now an incredible scene opened up before him.
 

And sitting nearby was a familiar figure.
 

The math creature’s mind was a curious thing. It had developed in a vacuum, where it had extrapolated on the barest minimum of data. The creature had been able to assimilate his own shape, although at first his spatial perception was so undeveloped that he was unable to perceive it as a shape. It was simply a succession of lines—routes over which he could run his sensory extensions.
 

Other shapes intruded. There was the hard Underneath, there were the occasional softnesses of beings that had a superficial linear resemblance to himself, and there were Things. These were small, purposeless shapes placed within his range by other beings. Then there was Food, and the Opposite of Food, both accompanied by Sensations.
 

Simple mathematics had occurred to him two years after his creation. He’d constructed symbols in his mind and woven them together, and gradually discovered a satisfaction even greater than Food. Algebra followed naturally, but as he built supposition on supposition, a nagging feeling of incompleteness began to obsess him. In some way, it seemed, he ought to be able to relate this mental toy to his special situation. Initially, that might seem terribly complex, but it could be reduced into order by making a few simple assumptions. As he thought, he ran his sensory extension absently along the edge of one of his Things—and suddenly the assumption was right there.
 

He assumed the existence of a straight line. He assumed points and angles, circles and trapeziums. Then, with an effort, he assumed infinity—just for the purpose of the exercise. Not because it really
was.
Such assumptions were easy—to an imaginative mind already three years old that had nothing else to think about...
 

Picture, now, the creature after fifteen standard years of development, his mind an intricate structure of mathematical concepts. He sat in the middle of these concepts, juggling them as he saw fit, pushing out the boundaries of new knowledge when he felt like it, always totally in control, always obeying his rigid logic. Picture a mathematical version of the imaginings of the delta’s Lazy Children.
 

Picture within that inhuman body the greatest mathematical genius the world has ever known or ever will know. Picture, if you can, a knowledge exceeding even that of the Rainbow—at least in this one so very logical subject.
 

Then picture, after a period of strange and uncomfortable physical experiences, the collapse.
 

His work that day has no name. It dealt with a realm of pure mathematics so exalted that no words will ever be found to describe it. Theorems were propounded, demonstrated and proved, and the creature’s heart was beating fast and painfully with the excitement of it. Another Truth was within his grasp. It was coming—as it always did—that moment of revelation. It was...
 

It was an extraordinary shining Thing, moving and shapeless, which tumbled his theorems and notions like atoms into confusion. It terrified the creature with its insistence and permanence. It stood there among the ruins of his mathematics. It was possessed of qualities he’d never dreamed of, qualities he couldn’t even name. It stood apart, without having to be
felt
, with an existence of its own, which made nonsense of everything.
 

It...
hated
him.
 

The creature writhed and grunted, his sensory extensions exploring himself and the limits of physicality around him, but he could find no explanation there, either. The shining Thing
was,
yet it
was not.
Where was it?
 

It was totally illogical, and—the worst part—it was bent on destroying him. He could not escape; he was trapped within his own mind.
 

The Thing moved!
 

His physical self was gone, snatched away from him!
 

Now he had
no
sensory appendages,
no
Food,
no
Opposite of Food, no Underneath, nothing.
 

He knew the depths of fear...
 

Time passed and nothing further happened. The Thing seemed to have gone and the creature peered out nervously from underneath himself. Nothing bad happened. Tentatively, the math creature began to impress his logic on the landscape. He glided across a plain of utter featurelessness, toward perfectly triangular mountains. He passed through them as though they were composed of mist.
 

The sun was a brilliant faceted ruby in a sky devoid of clouds. The horizon, where there were no mountains, was ruler-straight.
 

The math creature moved through a flat world that grew more geometric with each thought. Soon right-angled mountains appeared and two-dimensional extensions projected from them for use in future theorems. Meanwhile, the sky had become multi-dimensional and the ruby sun glittered from all conceivable angles, repeating itself into infinity.
 

And the world around him obeyed his thoughts because it was that kind of world, within the Rainbow and close to Dream Earth.
 

Finally, from memory, he recreated himself.
 

Zozula stood still for a long time, gazing with tears in his eyes at the creature. It looked so lost, so lonely in all this savage jaggedness, a sad little lump of soft flesh banished by the Rainbow because it was too clever.
 

“My master!” cried the dog in delight and trotted forward and began to lick the creature. The creature flapped at it in a gesture that obviously intended affection.
 

Zozula walked up to the creature, swallowed and said gently, “Come on, Mole. I’m going to take you home.”
 

The Mole, unhearing, patted the dog.
 

The Rainbow did not relinquish the Mole easily.
 

Zozula explained to the dog, and the dog spoke into the mind of the Mole. And the Mole contracted and became a small irregular crystal-thing that Zozula was able to pick up. The mountains swayed and the ground heaved.
 

Zozula and the Mole were blown into the Greataway like a wisp of thistledown.
 

Zozula screamed, but the sound never left his mouth. He kicked, but there were forces infinitely greater than his at work. His mind was assailed by a series of emotions from some source outside himself: rage, hatred, jealousy. He was snatched this way and that, as though in a maelstrom, while his joints creaked and huge blows buffeted him.
 

On a few happentracks he died and his body materialized at the feet of the Reasoner beside the Do-Portal.
 

On many happentracks he lived for millennia, his brain cells being absorbed into a tired memory bank, his flesh lending substance to Bigwishes; but he never saw the Outside again.
 

On just three happentracks he was ejected forcibly onto the floor of the Rainbow Room, bruised, breathless and terrified, and was violently sick at the feet of Selena, who had been trying to operate the console. In his memory was the echo of the dog’s cry,
I’m real! I’m real!
but the dog was not beside him any longer.
 

These last three inauspicious happentracks were the ones that, in the Ifalong, encompassed the Quest of Manuel, the Battle with the Bale Wolves, and the Release of Starquin...
 

They had been riding for hours. Their leader was a giant dressed in robes of fur with many tails that streamed in the wind. Dark and bearded he was, and his teeth showed whitely in a fierce grin of anticipation. His eyes were the blue of the Viking and on his head he wore a brazen helmet. His right hand clutched the handle of a flail, and his left was dug deeply into the shaggy coat of his mount.
 

His mount was a huge bear. Brown and bounding, larger than any bear of Early Earth, it covered the ground in great leaps, scaling rises and loose ground with a surefootedness no horse could match.
 

The followers were similarly mounted and clad, ten of them, and they uttered yells of excitement as they rode. They were the Bjorn-serkrs.
 

Now they entered a region of quiet grassland and woods, and their yelling shattered the stillness. Birds left the trees in flocks and rocketed from under the feet of their mounts. Other animals watched nervously from the cover of the woods, sensing the purpose of this mad gallop and wondering in their dim animal way who the quarry was.
 

The quarry was a girl.
 

Mounted on an eland, laid across its back and clutching its horns, she went like the wind, the grass hissing under flying hooves. She wore a pale green robe that, like those of the hunters, billowed behind her and lent her an ethereal air as she flitted among the trees. As she rode, she wept, and the wind whipped the tears from her cheeks. She wept in elementary fear, while the hunters yelled in elementary anticipation.
 

And that was the way they rode, mindlessly, across the grassland and through the forest.
 

Manuel was never able to work out what happened that night in the Land of Lost Dreams. All he knew was that when he awakened, the scenery was different and the Girl, the dog and Zozula were gone. After his initial fright, his natural resilience took over and he began to enjoy the adventure and to assume he was back on real Earth. It was good to be able to make his own decisions again.
 

He walked in a place of great beauty—a place even more beautiful than Pu’este. It was warm and the afternoon sun slanted through the leaves of the elm trees and lighted the branches of gnarled oaks. The ground was carpeted with short grass and small wildflowers, blue and violet. He sat beside a lake where bright dragonflies hovered and a small furry animal was drinking without fear.
 

The beautiful place seemed to be holding its breath, waiting.
 

A youth slipped into this picture. He strolled from behind a tree with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He was dressed in a green tunic and brown pants and wore a hat with a partridge’s tailfeather in it. When he saw Manuel, his whistling stopped in mid-phrase.