The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (13 page)

Then the boy said, “You remember the storm, God—when all the lifeweed came onto the beach?” He smiled at his own silliness. “Of course you remember—you sent it. Well, there was a girl...”
 

And he told the story of Belinda.
 

Now Dad Ose wanted to creep away. This was a private thing, and he had no right to listen even if it was his church. But he couldn’t leave, now. Manuel would hear any movement. Dad Ose listened in sadness and sympathy, unable to escape.
 

What disturbed him, though, was the way Manuel would stop talking every so often and appear to be listening. It was just a little eerie.
 

“So what shall I do, God?” Manuel asked eventually. “I’ve just got to see her again. Where is she? Where do I find her?”
 

And he listened.
 

And—Dad Ose stiffened with a thrill of horror—
was that a voice?
 

No, of course not. It was the wind in the bell tower, the distant sigh of a llama, it was the sea. It was not a voice.
 

Manuel nodded. “If you say so.” His voice was unhappy. He turned away. He said quietly, “Thank you, God.”
 

In the warmth outside, Dad Ose shivered. He swung away from the window and returned to the entrance in time to meet Manuel coming out. Manuel nodded and smiled and was about to pass on, when the priest spoke.
 

“What were you doing in there, Manuel?”
 

The youth looked slightly puzzled. “Talking to God, of course.”
 

“Of course. That’s what you said before. But...” The priest struggled for the right words. “You can’t really expect me to believe that, can you?” He smiled with an effort.
 

“It doesn’t matter.” Manuel was clearly depressed.
 

“No—I want to know. What’s it like, talking to God? How does he sound?”
 

“Well, you know that, Dad,” said Manuel in surprise.
 

“Of course I do—I was expressing myself badly. I’d just like to know what he said. You understand, I must know what goes on in my own church.”
 

“Oh...” Manuel flushed. “I have a... problem, over a girl. And so I asked God’s advice.”
 

“Isn’t that rather a small thing to bother him with?”
 

“Not to me, it isn’t. And anyway, he seemed quite happy to talk about it.”
 

“He is very understanding, Manuel. And what advice did he give you?”
 

“He told me that what I asked was not simple. He talked about strange things—happentracks, I think he said. And he said that in the Ifalong—I think he meant in the future—I would meet Belinda again, but then I’d lose her forever. And he said that I must go to the Dome very soon, maybe tomorrow, and speak to the man there, which would set everything on the right happentrack. He didn’t tell me what to say to him, though.”
 

They turned and regarded the Dome, which dwarfed the hills a few kilometers away. As they watched, the thing happened that never ceased to puzzle the Wild Humans. Near the curving top of the Dome, where the horse clouds passed close overhead and the gray opalescence of the massive hemisphere changed subtly to aquamarine, there was a flash of light.
 

In truth it was more like a
puff
of light. The flash was brief and diffused and seemed to have no source, and within it something solid and glittering was half seen, traveling outward with incredible speed, disappearing instantly as though it had accelerated past the speed of light and disappeared into some undimensional limbo.
 

“He wanted me to try to make friends with the man at the Dome,” said Manuel. “And he doesn’t really call himself God, by the way. That’s what you call him.”
 

Dad Ose regarded the youth helplessly. After 496 years, he could accept the inexplicable flashes from the Dome; the terrifying snake clouds that made people choke and die; the Quicklies, with their bewildering lifestyle; the fleet guanacos, with their uncanny sense for approaching disaster—he could accept all this. It was part of life.
 

But he would never accept the notion that Manuel talked with God.
 

It was humiliating and unthinkable that this youth with the strange emotions should be able to communicate with a being in which Dad Ose himself only half-believed. And Dad Ose was supposed to be the expert. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was being made fun of. He flushed. He tried to remain calm.
 

“Are you sure you don’t hear the voice in your own head?”
 

“Of course I do. You know what it’s like.” Manuel smiled.
 

This was too much. “Why do you lie to me, Manuel?”
 

“Lie? Why should I lie?”
 

“Trying to make a fool of me. Of me, Dad Ose, old enough to be your father many times over. The voice of God, eh? Why should God want to talk to you—a nobody? I tell you this, Manuel—in future you’ll put your questions to me, and I’ll speak to God for you. It’s an impertinence for a young man to address him directly!”
 

“If that were so, God would have told me.”
 

The priest gazed skyward as if seeking guidance. The fleecy horse clouds had given way to high wispy guanaco clouds, moving fast. There was dirty weather brewing again. The wind brought a whiff of kelp. Dad Ose inhaled and felt the lift that oxygen-rich air brings. He was silent for a while, thinking.
 

Then he said, mildly, “Tell me what God’s voice sounds like.”
 

Although the Rainbow monitored all activity on the Earth’s land surface during those years, it could not look inside people’s heads. Only the Dedos could do that. So it is not recorded when Manuel first became aware of the real difference between himself and other people. Here the minstrels must needs use poetic license, and they did:
 

Dad Ose asked the Boy about the prophesy he heard,
 

And Manuel knew that he alone could listen to
 

God's word
 

Manuel looked at him with his brown eyes and brushed aside the forelock of black hair. “It’s big,” he said, watching the priest with sudden compassion. “It’s big and you hear it not in just your ears, or even your head—you hear it in all your body, and in all that your body has been and ever will be. It’s an everything thing. It takes you. It fills you. You understand it better than men’s words, better than anything you’ve ever seen or wondered about, better even than your own thoughts. And you believe what it says.”
 

Half-convinced despite himself, the priest asked, “Does it scare you?”
 

“Not really. But one does what it says.”
 

“Otherwise... ?”
 

“I think God might stomp on the whole world.”
 

“Just because
you
disobeyed him? You, Manuel?”
 

“Yes,” said the boy simply, and the priest found himself shivering as the wind gusted cooler and he caught a glimpse of a future in which he was no longer immortal, about which he could do nothing, from which neither he nor the human race could escape.
 

“God be with you, my son,” he muttered as Manuel left.
 

It was time for his Inner Think, but he was too upset to concentrate properly. He tried, however. He sat cross-legged on the stone floor, the sunlight blinding on his white robe, twisted his hands into the traditional position and thought:
I live, and I will always live. Every cell of my body is regenerating at this very moment and will always do so...
And he tried to thrust his consciousness down into those cells to encourage them and lend their physicality to the strength of his mind.
Dying is meaningless. There is no reason for it. I will eliminate the Clock that tells my body to age. I will eliminate, eliminate the Clock.
 

His concentration was gone. He couldn’t speak to his body. He was watching a beetle crawl from sunlight into shadow while half his mind thought of Manuel.
 

How dare that kid say he’d spoken to God!
 

Dad Ose stood, dusting his robes off. Maybe a day without the Inner Think wouldn’t matter. Maybe he’d try again in the evening. And then again, maybe Manuel’s presumptuous sacrilege had cost him, Dad Ose, fifty years of his life. He flexed his muscles experimentally, and it seemed to him they felt older and feebler. Fear touched him, turning to anger. Manuel was trying to make a laughing stock of him, and Manuel ought to be dealt with severely.
 

But meanwhile, the sun was hot.
 

The place where the Triad would meet was waiting for them, and those three people’s happentracks were converging on this spot. The spot is now marked with a monument that may or may not be in the right place, because landscapes change. Legends change, too, over the aeons, and one particular legend is of interest because it is an analogy, telling how the Girl and her fellow neotenites came to be. It is a little more dramatic than the slow march of countless generations through which the neotenites evolved, and it goes like this:
 

There is a pool of water in a dusty place, and animals come to slake their thirst there. Anteaters and ouakaris, cavies and capybaras drink together with none of that uneasy watchfulness that you see when carnivores are about, for there are no carnivores in this region. The animals drink long and leisurely, and the pool reflects their faces and the blue sky above them.
 

Axolotls live in the pool. They spend most of their time on the bottom, their small feet resting lightly on the pebbles and mud, stirring with the light currents when one of the larger animals comes wading nearby, but otherwise not moving much. They are silvery white and translucent, with pink frilly gills rising from beside their heads like soft horns. The humans of these parts call them water dolls, and accept them and their strange secret as a part of nature and therefore natural, without thinking too much about it.
 

What is the secret of the axolotls?
 

They are child salamanders, trapped forever in immaturity and forced to live and breed that way.
 

How did they get like that?
 

We must go back to young Earth, when Pangaea was one huge continent and the Dedos were lately come...
 

There was a Dedo named Kweilin who lived alone in her pavilion somewhere near the center of Pangaea. The area abounded in large animals, and some presentiment had caused Kweilin to decide to have a child. It is often said of the Dedos that they have the ability to foresee the Ifalong as accurately as the Oracle of the later Dream People; and Kweilin, ages earlier, had that power. She foresaw a happentrack in which she was surprised and mortally wounded by a thylacosmilus, a marsupial tiger of her time. It happened away from the pavilion and her Rock, and she was unable to get back for her Healing Stone, so she died.
 

If Kweilin was indeed on that happentrack, she would be needing a daughter.
 

She composed herself and allowed her psy to penetrate deep within her body until she became aware of her womb, and the egg waiting there. Carefully, she activated it. For a few days she watched over it. Then, satisfied that all was well, she withdrew her essence and resumed a normal life. The Rock was busy, winter was coming and the crops had to be stored. She had plenty to do, so it was several weeks before she discovered that all was not well within her womb.
 

She found out one day in midwinter when her work for the day was done, the fire built and crackling in the stone hearth of the pavilion, the life on Earth slow and herself with time to spare. She looked within her body, inspecting the growing child.
 

It was a mutant. She was not going to have a daughter, after all. By that one-in-seventeen chance, something different had happened, and the thing in her womb was one of those odd creatures who are no use to Starquin or themselves, being without the inborn Duty, without even the capacity to reproduce themselves. Such creatures, when they occur, are simply turned loose to fend for themselves after the minimum of mothering.
 

Oddly enough, they do quite well in the wild. They are strong and crafty and seem to have an affinity for animals. And, the Dedos sensed, Starquin seemed to have some feeling for them, useless though they are. Some Dedos called them “eremitas,” although in legends they received a different name: Paragons.
 

Kweilin at first was mortified. She felt she had failed in some aspect of the Duty—or worse, that there might be something wrong in the make-up of her body. But this was nonsense, of course. The Dedos are pure; they can be no other way. Eventually she came to realize, as had many Dedos before her, that the birth of an eremita was perfectly normal, but rare. Therefore eremitas had their place in the scheme of things. Within a short while Kweilin had accepted this, and she settled down to her long pregnancy, concerned only to get it over with, to raise and release the eremita and to commence a true child before the thylacosmilus got her—if indeed it ever did.
 

She was four years pregnant and approaching the end of her time when the dreadful thing happened.
 

It was midwinter again and the snow lay lightly on the ground and the cold wind crackled among the yuccas. The nearby waterhole was frozen over and Kweilin had to smash the ice with a stone in order to fill her clay pot. The mature salamanders had long since left the waterhole and lay comatose under stones, half-buried in loose soil, hibernating. The many-faceted Rock, a little warmer than the surrounding earth, stood free of snow, a glittering black diamond as tall as the Dedo herself.