The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (2 page)

“Is that all?” Manuel seemed disappointed.
 

“Well... It’s good enough, isn’t it? You do find it good, don’t you, Manuel?” She was out of the chair, reaching for him.
 

“I can’t describe how I find it.” Millennia ago Wild Humans might have had a word for it, but not now. “I just feel that sex isn’t good enough by itself. Just touching for a few seconds and then walking away, like animals do. It’s not enough.”
 

“I’ll stay the night if you want me to, Manuel.”
 

“That’s not what I mean.” His gaze moved toward the hidden Simulator again and he found himself thinking of his latest composition. He called it
The Storm.
It was the best mind-painting he’d ever done, but he still wasn’t satisfied with it. “There’s something inside my mind that I want to use... that I want to
give,
Ellie. I don’t know if I can give it to you. I don’t think you’d understand what it was, if you had it.”
 

“Try me. I’m a very understanding person, Manuel. Joao, Pietro, the others, they all say how understanding I am.” She was standing very close, so that her hard little nipples touched his chest with their fire, and her lips turned up to his. “Sex is the most wonderful thing there is. It’s the best thing we do, better than eating roast peccary, and it makes you feel so good. What’s the matter with you, Manuel? I’m prettier than Rhea, surely. You didn’t mind sex with her.” She pouted. “Aren’t I good enough for you?”
 

“There has to be something more.”
 

“What more can there be?”
 

“You don’t feel anything more?” He took her hands, and now he was the desperate one, trying to see into her eyes in the dim, storm-laden light.
 

“I feel enough, Manuel. Don’t worry.” She spoke softly, mimicking his way. If this was how the strange boy wanted it, why not? There were worse ways.
 

“And what do you feel, Ellie?”
 

“I need a man, of course. You
know
.”
 

“Ellie... Please go away. Go back to the village. There are plenty of men there.” Still holding her hands, he led her outside, where the wetness swept in from the sea, a blend of rain and salt spray, and the horizon was very black. And the air was like whiskey.
 

Ellie sniffed it and, suddenly exhilarated, tossed her head, so that her hair flew like blackbirds, and laughed. “You’re crazy!” she shouted into the wind. “A crazy boy!” Something flashed by; it might have been a Quickly. “And I’m crazy too, coming here. Goodnight, Manuel! Sleep well, and dream of what you might have had!” She made a playful snatch at him but he swung away, smiling too.
 

He watched her go and wondered at the thing she was lacking, and—of course—regretted not having had her anyway. But he had more important things to do.
 

Manuel had built the shack when he was fourteen years old. That was five years ago. Pu’este had endured for untold centuries and the people lived in stone houses, rethatching the roofs every fifty years or so. But Manuel’s shack, like Manuel, was different, fashioned with painstaking care from driftwood and whalebone, mud and dried kelp and vine, a cohesive mass of matted material hard against the low cliff of brown sandstone at the north end of the bay.
 

Manuel was proud of it and didn’t mind people visiting; naively, he thought they came to admire. He became mildly annoyed when the Quicklies ran by, though—fighting and snarling and bumping into things and frightening the vicunas. In the early days he’d made a few abortive attempts to befriend the Quicklies and had even persuaded a gentler female to snatch food from his hand. But the thing that always puzzled Wild Humans had soon happened, and the female Quickly had been moving much more slowly the following morning—and then she had died, attacked by her own kind and mortally wounded.
 

Manuel piled more driftwood on his fire, then pacified his vicunas, which had become alarmed at the sudden sparks and crackling and were stamping and tossing their heads. He looked eastward, where the horizon was now massed with huge black clouds. He walked to the water’s edge and turned. From here he could see over the top of the low cliff to the distant hills. Tiny forms were moving. The guanacos were still converging on the valley. Dust clouds rose as the wind brushed the village fields. Wise Ana—the plump, cheerful woman who lived alone in a sandstone cave beside the road to the village—was gathering in her wares, closing down her store for the night. Sapa cloth fluttered. Thoughtfully, Manuel returned to the shack and brought out his meal, a reef fish wrapped in leaves and clay. He laid it in the fire.
 

He was sucking his fingers clean when he heard the twittering clamor from farther up the beach. The Quicklies were coming, probably hunting for food. He stepped into the hut and brought out the rest of his catch, three parrot fish that he’d been saving for his evening meal. He laid them on the beach; then, on an impulse, returned to the shack and brought out his most prized possession—the Simulator. He sat down before it and turned it on.
 

Manuel often found himself doing things for which there could be no explanation under the code of human behavior existing in the year 143,624 Cyclic. Wild Humans ran for shelter when they heard the Quicklies coming. As they ran, they caught up sticks, rocks, anything they could lay their hands on to defend themselves. The Quicklies were the ultimate in abominations and, so it was rumored, could strip a man to the bone in fifteen seconds flat. The rumor lacked concrete evidence, since nobody had ever lived to tell the tale, but it served to explain the curious disappearances that had bothered the fat chief Chine for many years.
 

“Elacio’s gone,” Chine had said one day. “The Quicklies got him. I saw his bones washing out on the tide.”
 

Manuel, who happened to be near, broke into the chorus of superstitious groans from the villagers. “Elacio fell into the Bowl,” he said, referring to a peculiar local landmark. “I saw him down there yesterday. His neck was broken. The sirens had already started to eat him, but you could still tell who it was.”
 

“Get back to the beach where you belong,” snapped Chine. “It would be better for us all if the Quicklies took you, one day.”
 

“May God go with you, you young sinner,” said the priest, Dad Ose, unctuously.
 

Chine had shot the priest a look of piggy ferocity, suspecting him of enlisting divine protection for Manuel in the youth’s encounters with the rapacious Quicklies.
 

And this stormy evening Manuel was once again risking his life—or at least chancing the destruction of the Simulator, the most wonderful object he’d ever possessed.
 

Misty clouds swirled before the machine, a three-dimensional image thrown by a battery of projectors on the front of the cabinet. The clouds took on form, substance and pattern. This was Manuel’s favorite image:
The Storm
. He’d created it himself, out of his own mind, with the aid of a helmet that fed his thoughts into the cabinet.
 

“Ya-heeeee!”
 

The yell meant the Quicklies had sighted Manuel. They’d been racing about the beach randomly, like speeding electrons, so fast that the eye could hardly follow them, kicking up sand, splashing through the shallows, actually running across the surface of the water like basilisks and vaulting the waves. They yelled and leaped, and occasionally fell to fierce quarreling. As Manuel watched, one of them, a little smaller than the rest, slowed down, aged and died. It fell to the sand, revealing itself as a chimpanzee-sized humanoid with a large head, hairless, very thin.
 

“Ya-heeeee!”
 

The Quicklies arrived. Manuel felt the usual nervous tightening of the throat. He gulped and with his foot pushed the parrot fish toward an area of blurred disturbance in the sand. Then he snatched his foot away. You couldn’t be too careful, and despite his skepticism about Chine’s theories, he couldn’t suppress the vision of his foot becoming instantly skeletal, gleaming white.
 

In fact the fish became skeletal. He never saw the Quicklies eat them: One second the iridescent scales were glowing in the moist air, the next second the bones lay dispersed in little heaps, the flesh absorbed into the Quicklies’ phenomenal metabolism.
 

Then, as happened sometimes, some of the creatures began to stand comparatively still, watching him, blinking with unbelievable rapidity, so that their big eyes appeared out of focus. The outline of their bodies was blurred too, since it is not possible for Quicklies to stand completely motionless.
 

They babbled at him in the thin rattle of sound that he’d never been able to understand. It seemed to him that they talked faster every time he met them, and he had a scary thought: Maybe they were in fact speeding up toward the point where they simply became invisible and were able to do completely as they pleased.
 

They were sitting down! This was something new. One by one each upright form disappeared, to be instantly replaced by a sitting one. They sat in a circle, watching the Simulator with wide eyes. One keeled over and died, its outline firming up. It was an old, old man, tiny and pathetic, not in the least threatening. The body remained for a moment, then disappeared. Manuel refused to consider what had happened to it. The other Quicklies continued to watch the Simulator.
 

The colors of Manuel’s mind-painting played. They swirled in a curious helical pattern like smoke or clouds. They were turquoise and gray, joyful and sad, and they were reflected at the lower part of the painting in a way that suggested wet sand and sea and things found and lost. They were wonderful and unique in each moment, and they represented the perfect amalgam of art and technology—the strange mind of a young dreaming Wild Human named Manuel and the invention of some long-forgotten scientist who had found how to give substance to those dreams.
 

And the Quicklies were crying.
 

They sat blinking and blurred, and it was odd to see the tears running down those joggling faces just like normal tears, just as slow and trickling. The Quicklies sat there aging, using up the few precious hours of their lives in contemplation of Manuel’s masterpiece, while they cried at the beauty of it. And yet—so it always is with art—they were not satisfied. One of them was trying to communicate with Manuel. She raised her hand. She was a middle-aged female and she spoke with excruciating care—and each syllable took her a subjective month to say. But her meaning reached the boy. For the first time ever, a Quickly had spoken to him. She spoke, and she died, carried away in late middle age by some undiagnosed disease that ran its course in two seconds.
 

She had said:
It needs more love.
 

The Rainbow—Earth’s great computer that sees everything and knows everything and still has not run down—recorded that scene. And over the millennia to come, historians would puzzle over that moment and speculate on the identity of that determined little Quickly who devoted her last years to one purpose, to one sentence that was to plant a seed of knowledge in the mind of young Manuel, later to become celebrated as the Artist in The Song of Earth.
 

Manuel regarded the mind-painting, and he thought about the word
love
and the emotion it might describe. He’d put into that painting something that embarrassed him, something that had caused him to keep the machine and its projections away from other people, to hide it from those prying fingers that delved through his possessions whenever he was not at home.
 

He didn’t know the thing was called “love.” But the word sounded right. And he was not alone.
 

Somewhere, other people knew of love. It just so happened that up to now he’d never met anyone else who possessed it. Wild Humans have basic needs, such as staying alive and breeding, and love was a luxury they had lost a long time ago. Nobody in the village possessed it.
 

He’d hidden his love because others might laugh at it—as Ellie had laughed at it—but he’d shown it privately to the machine. And now the Quickly woman
 

said he hadn’t shown enough. What else did the mind-painting need? Helplessly, he looked back at the Quicklies.
 

Two more lay dead, disappearing even as he watched. Others looked terribly old. He was wasting their time. Hastily he switched off the machine, ignoring their twitters of despair, and carried it back to its hiding place. When he returned, the Quicklies were gone. They must have been starving. Some distance out to sea the water was in a turmoil. The Quicklies were probably fishing, knifing through the water with a speed no fish could match.
 

For a while he sat and watched the storm clouds gathering, big merino clouds just as Insel had forecast yesterday, sending a gusting wind as a storm messenger. Then he stood, glanced around and found everything in order, murmured a word of encouragement to his vicunas and entered his shack.
 

He sat in his chair, dismissed an intrusive image of Ellie’s warm body, put on the helmet and relaxed, watching the projection area. He began systematically to discipline his thoughts, concentrating on the storm.
 

Manuel’s images swirled. The walls of his shack trembled to the wind. Something pattered on the roof and rolled off. The sounds did not distract him; they were essential to his mood. He thought loneliness, he thought the wind, the broad beach, the creatures that burrowed into the wetness. The sea. He was painting another storm—and this time he was trying to put more
love
into it.