The Eskimo Invasion (56 page)

 

 

"Move aside. Let me look." Dr. West raised his flashlight to sun-dried
yellow bricks. "Foundations. Permanent village."

 

 

But the bricks above were fire-blackened. When the Esk jabbed the crowbar
up among them, crumbling bricks roared down, releasing a landslide of
compacted chunks of kitchen midden against Dr. West. Struggling to free
his leg, he found his fellow man.

 

 

"This green lump encloses a skull. Helmeted he was buried in the trash of
his ancestors. The green oxide was copper, a helmet or a crown. Already
we're digging up through the graves of men more sophisticated than Eskimos."

 

 

The crowbar clanged upward against masses of harder brick. "A village
built upon a village."

 

 

Bricks thudded down, and Dr. West swept them between his legs, centered
them rumbling down the tunnel. "More blackened brick and charcoaled
wooden beams. This village has been raided, burned."

 

 

A clod of fire-darkened soil contained a triangular stain of rust.
"The killers came with iron arrow points. We must be within 5000 years of
the surface. Dig! We're only a heartbeat from the surface of man's long
evolutionary climb."

 

 

A clod slashed his palm. It contained white shards sharp as glass.
"We've broken into recorded history. Perhaps your head and shoulders are in
1100 B.C., among the descendants of the semimythical Yellow Emperor.
Yes, armed with civilization these ethnic Chinese had migrated northward.
They built fortifications on the future site of Peking."

 

 

The crowbar was dislodging masses of crumbling brick into the hole. "They
rarely built with stone. After the roof beams burn, the protective roof
tiles fall. Chinese castles dissolve in the rain," he laughed. "But in
300 B.C. the King of Yen began the Great Wall."

 

 

A charred beam slid into the hole. "North China was overwhelmed by the
Hu tribes. In distant Europe were they called the Huns? Already we are
past the time of Christ. Dig! Before we reach 605 A.D. the Grand Canal
will reach Peking. The population is multiplying rapidly now. Dig!"

 

 

In the falling debris lay a green gourd-shaped vase unbroken, but under
its surface glaze, appearing spider-web cracked. Dr. West gently extricated
its smooth beauty. "Already we must have reached the 1100s A.D. because
this is a Kuan vase, and the crackle-lines in the porcelain are intentional."

 

 

The crowbar smashed upward, and burned wreckage fell down. "Genghis Khan
has taken Peking."

 

 

Blue-and-white porcelain shards fell like rain. "Already we are through
with the Mongols and you are poking your crowbar into the Ming Dynasty.
We are less than 500 years from the surface."

 

 

Sand streamed down from a rodent's tunnel. Above them glowed a little
round hole like a luminous eye. "It is daylight up there!"

 

 

Gently, Dr. West laid his hand on the shoulder of the Esk and took the
crowbar from him. "I am your leader, your angakok, your Mao, and only
I have the power to break through to the Present. Close your eyes.
The Future is blinding."

 

 

Dr. West thrust up the crowbar through the worn brick paving of the Manchus,
shouldered aside the thin new bricks of the Communists, and lifted his head
into the dazzling sunlight.

 

 

The long pink walls within the Imperial City glowed with sunlight. The
vast paved square lay golden with dust. Covered with motionless ripples
of loess dust, the Great Square where millions had paraded before Mao's
platform was shrouded with Gobi dust.

 

 

A distant chopping sound made Dr. West turn his head uncertainly, his ears
confused by the echoes. His low angle of vision, with only his head above
the widespread pavement of the enormous square, made the pink walls seem
to lean inward. Arches appeared too close or too distant. Empty brown
flower beds along the walls seemed tilted like brown stripes, as Dr. West
blinked in the strange perspective of the Great Square and arches, as
if his head had risen in a Daliesque painting. His nervous gaze sought
the sound. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo!

 

 

So close he had not noticed in the foreground glowed clean white rib cages
in the golden dust. In waves of dust floated smooth white ovals. He stared
at the shadowed eyeholes of the skulls.
Esks or men?

 

 

Thousands of skeletons lay all around him, no matter which way he turned
his head. The perspective made them appear to him as if they lay in
concentric circles around him, as if fallen from a dance pattern.
He blinked his eyes. Close to his hand a skeletal hand overlapped
another's hand as if --
Esks or men?

 

 

Dr. West struggled up out of the hole and whirled, peering down at
the smiling Esk in its darkness. "Stay back! The sun will kill you,"
he lied. "My command is wait. Send down this word." Already he could
hear his other Esks chattering in the tunnel. "Until darkness, wait."

 

 

He stared at a fallen signboard. The withered paint still extolled
Mao III's last Three-Anti's Campaign:
Anti-Imperialist. Anti-Revisionist.
Anti-Intellectualist.
He dragged the flimsy signboard over the hole.

 

 

From the effort of dragging the signboard, Dr. West swayed like an old man,
his heart pounding.

 

 

Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo! Turning, scanning for the chopping sound in the
burning sunlight, he dizzied, the pink walls flowing past. He stopped.

 

 

On the distant pink wall, the dark shape, the shadow of the shape,
bent up and down. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo!

 

 

His throat clutching his soundless shout, Dr. West ran forward. Across
golden ripples of dust, he ran toward the pink wall. He saw moving on
the brown strip of the bare flower bed, shadowed upon the pink wall,
up and down, the dark figure wielding a hoe.

 

 

Man or Esk?

 

 

Startled, whirling, cornered, the squat figure raised its hoe like
a weapon.

 

 

It is a man, Dr. West thought as joy blurred his eyes.

 

 

He felt his face stretching. Smiling senselessly as an Esk, Dr. West
staggered toward the man.

 

 

The ragged man backed against the pink wall. The sunlight glinted on
his hoe's blade.

 

 

"We both are men," Dr. West blurted in Chinese.

 

 

The old man shifted his weight. On the chopped dirt, with his foot,
he was trying to conceal something behind his incongruous blue tennis
shoe. Dr. West extended his open hand, and the old man's eyes slitted in
fright, his elbows rising, the gleaming snake's head of his hoe poised
to strike.

 

 

"It is true I am an American -- " Dr. West spread his open hands in a
gesture of peace. " -- a whiteman, but you and I -- not Esks. We are men."

 

 

The old man's forehead creased vertically as if squeezed by conflicting
beliefs, his foot guarding the sack. "These seeds are not to be eaten.
They are for -- seeds."

 

 

"May your crop be -- " Dr. West fumbled into his pocket and handed the
old man whatever he found there, " -- be fortunate."

 

 

Hesitantly, the gnarled hand closed on the pencil stub. Dipping his head,
the old man abruptly lowered his hoe and squatted down. From a grease-
stained knotted rag he extricated a leathery strip. Twisting it apart,
he proffered the larger part to Dr. West.

 

 

Solemnly the old man chewed.

 

 

Dr. West chewed the hard-smoked meat, salty as tears. "Where are --
the people?" Dr. West's eyes burned.

 

 

"Planting." The old man seemed surprised that the question had been
asked. "Outside the walls the dirt has more dampness for crops."
His hand fingered the dry soil of what had been a flower bed in the
Great Square. "But my wall keeps out the wind. My knees ache. Before
the electricity stopped, I was a subway conductor, not a -- "

 

 

"Whose skeletons?" Dr. West interrupted.

 

 

The old man's eyelids closed, wrinkling, and his forehead wrinkled as if
he had begun pondering a deeper question. "You say you are an American.
I never truly believed that the Americans sent the plague. Our bodies,
the stench in the subway -- None of the Smiling People were sick. They
cared for us as best they could."

 

 

"Then these are the skeletons of men?" Dr. West's heart contracted.

 

 

"No, Esks, of course!" The old man's face showed surprise at Dr. West's
ignorance. "Their souls have flown, I think."

 

 

"The Esks are dead everywhere?"

 

 

"I do not think they are truly dead. They joined hands."

 

 

The old man glanced at the sky. "The flesh has been gone from their bones
for a season."

 

 

Dr. West covertly expectorated the salty meat into his palm, and stared
at the old man's leathery face.

 

 

"Who can say who is dead? In this little world -- " the old man ruminated
his salted meat solemnly, " -- little can be understood -- Circles like
dancers. Many little circles joined together like a net. But they did
not dance."

 

 

"All the skeletons are in this square?"

 

 

"I think everywhere in Peking, and in other places all over the world,
I am told. They did not dance, although they were smiling like bridegrooms
and brides at the sky." The old man squinted upward.

 

 

Dr. West blinked from the skeletons of the Esks to the blinding sky.
"What did you see -- up there?"

 

 

"See? We old men know only the body dies. When men are hungry enough,
meat can be salted and it makes no difference to the soul. A poor man
like myself understands only how to survive on this Earth."

 

 

"What did you see?" Dr. West repeated, his voice rising.

 

 

"They are all around us, I think." The old man turned his weathered face.
"Years ago when there were not so many, we called them the Smiling People.
We called them the Dream Persons. Perhaps they were smiling because
they were in a dream and they knew what was going to happen. Your face
is angry."

 

 

"I'm not angry. I want to know!" Dr. West's chest pain was tightening.

 

 

"Nor I," the old man muttered, closing his gnarled knuckles around the
handle of his hoe. "After the confusion, the lack of rations, some of
us killed Dream Persons. Not enough. Pulling out a few hairs does not
kill the head."

 

 

"What did you see!"

 

 

"It is too difficult to explain." The old man glanced sideways toward
the pink arch. "Some day someone will repair the electricity. The subway
cars will move. I will receive my ration tickets because I was -- am not
a peasant! In my subway car -- " The old man stared past Dr. West's shoulder
toward the center of the Great Square.

 

 

On the glaring sand out there was a dark movement.

 

 

Beside Dr. West, the old man raised his hoe with a hissing inhalation of
fear or rage, and scurried out across the dust, running like a spider
across the golden ripples of the Square toward the dark spots emerging
like ants cut of the pavement.

 

 

"Oh god, they're coming out of the tunnel." Dr. West saw his distant Esks
wandering out into the glaring sunlight.

 

 

As the old man's diminishing silhouette reached them, his hoe's blade
flashed high and struck. One small figure staggered, clutching its
shoulder. The old man struck again with the hoe, and another figure
slumped to its knees. Somehow the old man appeared entangled among them
but his hoe struck down, and his back heaved up but his hoe did not
rise. The old man's small figure lurched away.

 

 

Empty-handed, the old man ran back toward Dr. West, his face contorted.
"More. Again! Returned." His breath hissing, he ran past Dr. West
through the pink arch out of the Square.

 

 

Dr. West knew the old man had run for help, for other men to help
slaughter his Esks. The old man could not know how many Esks were
spreading out of the tunnel.
The consequences?

 

 

Dr. West's heart pain clutched. He stared at his Esks emerging like lost
children into the Great Square. Dr. West started toward them.

 

 

"Go back!" he shouted. "Go back down into the hole."

 

 

He tried to herd the spreading Esks back to the tunnel.

 

 

You are too late
, he thought sadly at them.
Your purpose --
"Go back!" he shouted in sudden anger.
You have destroyed my life
,
he thought as he pushed helplessly at them.
Without malice, you have
multiplied. All over the world your increasing numbers have hastened
the Malthusian forms of death for man. All of my adult life, you have
multiplied, confronting me with my inability to halt either your purpose
or lack of purpose.
He was past anger. "Please go back."

 

 

His Esks were smiling at the empty sky. Their hands were linking. On all
sides of Dr. West, they were forming little circles of Esks touching other
little circles throughout the Great Square. They stood waiting.

 

 

"You are too late. Go back." Dr. West glanced from the dark tunnel to
the pink arch through which savage human men would attack.

 

 

The wind moved. The dry air crackled. Dr. West thought he heard a humming
sound. It was coming from the Esks.