The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (32 page)

“You know
so
much, dear,” remarked Enchantress, her eyes like little black stones.
 

“However, a lot of people had been infected. There was a fear the whole ocean could turn to bor, but then they found that the Macrobes died if bor
 

was diluted too much—apparently they reproduced sexually, and dilution of bor meant they died before they could reach one another.”
 

“But what were they
like?
” asked Agonistes.
 

“They were small organisms with a very strong sense of self-preservation. They increased the host’s metabolism, made him wary, alert, content, potent, happy, scared, all of those things and more—anything appropriate to the given moment that would have the effect of helping him to
keep alive
, and so keep his Macrobes alive.
 

“But in a way the Macrobes were self-defeating, because when they increased a host’s metabolic rate they decreased his life expectancy. Possibly this didn’t happen on their home planet; in any case, it was a drawback to their life on Earth. So they evolved further... They entered the very chromosomes of their host, thus ensuring their survival for as long as humans existed. They became a gene, a hereditary trait. In effect they changed Mankind—or at least that section of Mankind through which they spread.”
 

“Horrible...” said Enchantress.
 

And Sudden was back with them, grinning smugly, a gold chain hung around his neck. He sat down, listening.
 

“Mankind had two choices. Bor had long since disappeared except for a single, closely guarded laboratory specimen. But the Macrobes lived on in their hosts, and these hosts were a little
better
than ordinary people. They did not, however, live as long, which could be construed as bad. So it was decided they should not be allowed to have children...” Maya blinked, visibly returning to the present. “It was the only way,” she concluded.
 

Sudden said, “She paid me well. Very well... Your history is dull, Maya. I like history about people, not bugs. Real history, like why this old man got thrown out of the Guild and had to come to this place to try to earn a living in competition with crooks like us.”
 

“Somebody’s coming...” said Maya.
 

Agonistes was trembling. “The Bale Wolves can jump happentracks,” he said. He remembered the confusion and Rowena screaming, and his efforts to maintain concentration while the Invisible Spaceship began to dissolve around them, threatening to leave Rowena and him unprotected and the drogues exposed. The Bale Wolves were pure evil. It’s hard to concentrate, close to anything so merciless; yet he
had
maintained concentration. He knew he had.
 

“It doesn’t matter how good you are,” he continued. “They’ll find you out. They’ll hunt back in Time a little way and sniff out all your alternative Selves. Some of them will be a little better than you are at this given instant, and some of those Selves will be a little worse... They’ll find a weak one. They’ll find some happentrack on which you were feeling a little sicker, a little weaker, a little less brave. And they’ll attack
that
You. Then they’ll jump back, right beside you in your mind and your body. And you’ll scream and throw them out because you’ve been taught the way by the Guild—but just for an instant you’ll have relaxed, and the shields will be down, and the wolves will appear physically, evil brutes that can’t be killed, that can always outwit you.”
 

“Excuses, old man. Your superiors knew better. They threw you out of the Guild.”
 

“That was standard procedure. There is no formal trial. Nobody who’s been attacked by the Bale Wolves can ever be trusted again. There’s no blame attached to it—it’s simple fact.”
 

“So what are you doing plying for hire?”
 

“Short trips, that’s all...” Agonistes’ gaze shifted around. He was cornered.
 

“But you never take any. You just sit here by the Pillar, year after year.”
 

“It’s the Greataway... There’s something about it. It draws you, even since the Hate Bombs have restricted it. The Guild—it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I lost it all. The adventure—like nothing on Earth. The fellowship, the trust.” His sentences had become disjointed and emotional, and Sudden began to look abashed. “And Rowena... I... I loved her. That was what made it so terrible. I loved her better than all the Greataway, and I would have died for her. I
tried
to die for her. And yet somewhere, on some other happentrack, there was another Me who didn’t love her quite enough...”
 

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Maya vehemently.
 

Four people on a chunk of rock between Mars and Jupiter: an old, imperfect man and an old, embittered woman, a young pretender and Maya. Four people huddled beside a nodal point in the Greataway for an instant in history, remarkable only because their lives were of no consequence whatever. Nothing they did had any measurable effect on the Ifalong. In the overall scheme of things, it is difficult to understand the purpose of any of these people except Maya.
 

Days or months later another Traveler came.
 

Sudden saw her first.
 

He stood, dashing a lock of hair away from his eyes, smiling. “I’m Sudden and I have the mynde. I can take you anywhere.”
 

This woman was tall, quietly dressed and young. Her hair fell in dark waves about her shoulders, her face was pale but not pallid and there was a luster to her skin—not that skin-deep luster that comes from the rejuvenation salons, but a deeper glow of confidence and health and real youth.
 

Sudden hesitated. “I... Maybe I...”
 

It was her eyes, dark blue, like cobalt, and searching, moving through him, weighing him briefly and finding him inadequate. It was her step, sure and strong as she walked toward them, so that Sudden, for reasons unknown, found himself backing off. It was many things in the young woman, but mostly it was an aura of supreme intelligence... Or not quite that. Of supreme
knowledge.
In her short life she’d seen it all.
 

Maya watched her, lips parted in a half-smile.
 

Enchantress muttered, “I don’t think I...”
 

This woman would have no truck with charlatans. Why had she come? She looked as though she had the mynde to travel alone, to cast off the Hate Bombs and journey to the end of the stars and absorb the knowledge of the Universe. She stopped walking and stood before them.
 

She said, “Take me home now, Paul.”
 

Aging is good and dying is good: Humans were right to suspect the Macrobes. Death was the first great mutation of life, and to deny death might be part of the ultimate evil.
 

So the old man stood looking at the woman who had lived with the nightmare creatures and, knowing her, he knew something of what had happened. How they took her and tortured her, so that she wished for death—but they anticipated that and they denied it to her; they even denied her the hope of aging. She stayed young while they did their worst, while they tortured her, not to obtain information or for any other reason that a human might understand, but simply because they were Bale Wolves. They didn’t torture her for the fun of it, or out of hatred, but simply because of what they are.
 

And she beat them.
 

How Rowena beat the Bale Wolves is another story. Now she was here, just as Paul-called-Agonistes remembered her. And she remembered him too, seeing through the crackled flesh to the psycaptain underneath. “Take me home, Paul,” she said.
 

Rowena is important because of what she did, but Paul is a nobody in the vastness of Time and only appears in her life because of what he can give her—because she loved him too.
 

So it is of little importance that, as he walked with Rowena to the Pillar, an extraordinary thing happened to him. Maya, you see, had the power to
give
—just occasionally, when the situation demanded.
 

As they held hands before winking out, the years melted away from the body of Paul-Agonistes until he was as young as the beautiful woman he stood beside. But her smile as she watched him didn’t change and Maya wondered if she even noticed the difference. Then they were gone.
 

Enchantress noticed the difference. “Did you see what I... No, it couldn’t have been. Forget it.” She was still old herself, and would remain so until she died. Something ate at her inside. A fury grew. “Why should
she
ask
him
to take her, after what happened?”
 

“That... Was that... No, it couldn’t have been the Rowena he was always talking about.” Sudden spoke haltingly, still dazed.
 

“It was, it was.” Enchantress spat the words. “And do you know why? Because she’s a Host, that’s why. I’m going after them.” She blundered to her feet. “I’m going to turn her in to the authorities if I have to follow her to the ends of the Greataway!”
 

“Stay where you are, Enchantress,” Maya said. “You’ll never find them.”
 

“And what do
you
know about that? You think you know so much, but I’ve never seen you travel. You and your words and your baby eyes.” Enchantress’s spite was redirected against Maya. The old woman looked at the young girl and saw everything she’d lost. “You know so much and yet you’re so young. How do you do it—tell me that! Lost your tongue, have you? Right—so that old fool and his girl got away, but I’ll see to it you don’t. You’re a Host yourself, and don’t you try denying it! You’re for recycling, my girl!”
 

Maya shrugged, smiled and walked away. “The Macrobes evolved into a recessive gene. It was their last defense during the Pogrom of the Hosts. You won’t find any of them around.”
 

“How do you know all that, eh?”
 

“I remember things, that’s all.”
 

And she strolled off past the Pillar with an odd vision swirling like a mist in her mind—a vision of a beach, blue sky and blue sea—things she’d never seen. She heard words too, quiet words of a thoughtful mind:
But love should be a simple thing of silence, with no need to justify.
 

She wondered what they meant, and what the beach and sky and sea meant. Her mind was a curious thing, the way it conjured up these visions. And what was love? What
really
was love? And who was this mind speaking to her from a long way off—or was she simply eavesdropping on a mind talking to itself? One thing was certain—the mind spoke in the future. Whenever she’d had a vision of something unrecognizable, it was in the future; she’d proved that by experiment.
 

Now the vision was fading as she reached her living quarters. She was left with the afterimage of a tiny creature yawning and stretching and coming awake in the body of a young man after a thousand years’ slumber. The young man was talking to the creature, of course, not to himself. He was reasoning with the benign parasites in his body and persuading them to help him to do what was best for both of them—and this did
not
mean speeding up his metabolism. He was in fact practicing the crude and undeveloped beginnings of the Inner Think. Maya didn’t know this. She wondered for a while, then forgot the young man, although his quiet words stayed with her as she greeted her ancient mother and made herself ready for the night.
 

Sudden watched her go. He stiffened. “That’s strange.”
 

“What’s strange?”
 

“Oh... just for a moment, I thought...”
 

He didn’t tell Enchantress, because he didn’t want to appear a fool. He could have been mistaken. Funny things happen to the mind on a tiny asteroid.
 

Just for a moment, he thought he’d seen Maya disappear into a kind of purple tent, but then the tent had gone. It must have been a mirage.
 

He was a nightmare dreamed up by the humans of Dream Earth. He was created that way, and endowed with all the trappings of evil like the model he was based upon, a fictional character from long ago. Nobody knows why he was created, unless it was to satisfy some deep human urge to be frightened—that urge that causes children to be fascinated by monsters. Or unless, again, it was to stave off the simple tedium of Dream Earth.
 

Many people were involved in the nightmare and each contributed horrors from the depths of his soul, dreaming together in some blazing chasm of imagined hell. They added a feature here and a characteristic there, dank clothing and a fetid odor, and then they turned the creature loose—relatively formless, but a conglomeration of evil traits. Other dreamers came upon the thing and saw it through their own eyes, and it so happened that it made a connection in their minds, and gradually an appropriate image began to solidify; and the blind man began tapping his way around the hills and valleys of Dream Earth.
 

He added piquancy to the existence of the Dreamers. They would taunt him and occasionally trip him, while he, face contorted with diabolical rage, would lash out blindly with his stick, hissing oaths. And his tormentors would back off, hugging themselves with fear and delight. For a while this was fun. But as time went by, the curious logic of Dream Earth began to assert itself and the blind man evolved an unusual protective instinct. A Mohor noticed it first, but without recognizing it. This bogus emperor from the Second Dark Age strode up to the blind man, intending to scorch him a little with his pistola. The blind man skipped aside.
 

“He can see!” said the Mohor, surprised. “The blind man’s getting his sight back. Who’s been fooling around here?”