The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (40 page)

“There aren’t many dark places in the Dome.”
 

“Could he have been Outside?”
 

“No... I saw machinery. Piping and conduits.”
 

“One of the service areas.” Juni thought. “The sewers! That’s it!” It was the kind of place where she would expect to find Brutus. When he was on Earth, much of his time was spent in the disposal areas, operating the deprocessing units. You could smell it on him.
 

They took a circle speedway, changed to a radius after a few minutes, rode it to the very wall of the Dome, stepped off and ran through an ever-darkening catacomb of corridors, shouting:
 

“Brutus!”
 

In the end they found him sitting in a dark corner near the outfall, whittling... and crying. The floor was covered with wood shavings. In the middle of the shavings lay a model boat, a very simple boat, little more than a tiny raft with low sides.
 

Selena had known about Brutus’s hobby for a long time. Like his father before him, Brutus spent his spare time modeling ships along the lines of the ancients’ vessels—a harmless enough pursuit. The little boat in the middle of the floor was a very poor example of his work.
 

“What’s the matter, Brutus?” asked Selena.
 

Suddenly aware of their presence, he jumped to his feet, dusting himself off, blinking, his fierce little eyes flicking constantly to a corner of the chamber.
 

“There’s something funny going on here,” said Zozula. “What have you been up to, Brutus?”
 

“Nothing... nothing.”
 

But Juni had found the baby. She brought it into the light. It was wrapped in a blanket, and it was quite dead. Brutus blinked at it.
 

Selena said, “This is one of the batch we brought back from the People Planet for deprocessing, Brutus.” Her voice was uncharacteristically cold. “What were you doing with it? Why didn’t you put it in the recycler with the others?” She stiffened, staring at him. She strode across the chamber and read off a bank of dials. “You didn’t put
any
of them in, Brutus! Where are they?
What have you done with them?
”
 

“I didn’t... I never...”
 

Now Juni stepped forward, staring at him with loathing. “What did you do with all those neotenite babies, you Specialist?”
 

Zozula, watching her, felt sick.
 

She turned to him. “Make him talk.”
 

Zozula said slowly, “All those boats he’s making—I know where they’ve gone. This lock—it leads Outside. It vents into the river. He’s been
playing
with the babies. He’s been sailing them on the river, like dolls. Oh, God.”
 

“Haven’t you anything to say, Brutus?” asked Selena. “You’re the best assistant I’ve ever had. You knew what you were doing. Why did you do it?”
 

And slowly the gorilla-man’s demeanor changed, and the animal receded while the human in him took over. He drew himself up, and he was taller and broader, stronger than anyone there. He tossed the knife to the floor, where it clattered among the wood shavings. He straightened his clothes.
 

Quietly he said, “I was giving them a chance.”
 

“What!”
 

The words came calmly. “They deserve a chance, just like anyone else. We’ve bred them and we have a responsibility, don’t you see?” His deep eyes watched them, begging for understanding. “We can’t kill them just because they don’t measure up to our ideals of Humanity.”
 

“But Brutus—they’re neotenites.” Something of his sentiments got through to Selena and she moderated her tone. “They’ll never grow up properly. You know that—we tested them all. They wouldn’t stand a chance out there. By sending them Outside you prolong their suffering. They take longer to die, like this little one here.” She held the dead baby out to him, but he wouldn’t look.
 

“I didn’t build enough boats this year,” he said stubbornly. “And by the time I—”
 

“
This
year?” Zozula broke in. “How long has this been going on?”
 

“All my life, and the life of my father and his father—and others.”
 

“My God—we could have populated the world with these monsters!”
 

“No,” said Selena, “they have no sex. I only add that quality when I’m satisfied with the other results.”
 

“Just what qualities do they have, Selena?”
 

“Nothing that could help them Outside. A very strong capability for visualization—that would help them in their dream lives, if ever they went into the Rainbow. They’re telepathic and highly intelligent, of course. But nothing to help them survive in the wild. They’re babies, Zozula. If they haven’t drowned or starved, the crocodiles will have got them.” She turned back to Brutus. “It’s cruel, cruel, this thing you’ve been doing!”
 

“I meant no harm.” His tone was resigned. He couldn’t win. He could only preserve the dignity of his people and behave like a human being.
 

“I hope not.”
 

“It won’t happen any more.”
 

“You can be sure of that,” said Selena.
 

In years to come, the great civilization of the delta faded piece by piece as, with no children to pass their wonderings on to, the people died. The spaceships dissolved and the minarets tumbled, the paintings and statuary blew away, the underground machines fell silent and the solid rock moved back into the caverns.
 

The last inhabitant died young, insane, his mind teeming with the accumulated imaginings of generations, unwilling to let go, unwilling to forget the smallest wonderful detail, hoarding the images of genius until his mind exploded, and, gibbering, he wandered away and fell among Wild Humans, who treated him as a god until he died.
 

And a certain remote dimension of the Greataway fell silent.
 

The Rainbow rejoiced.
 

It was a later Cuidador who built on an ancient report of Zozula’s and discovered the truth about Eloise’s tribe. The Rainbow parted with the data grudgingly, bit by bit, but in the end the story of the great delta civilization became known. The Cuidadors were amazed and stunned, and ultimately overcome with guilt because the destruction of the tribe reflected adversely on their integrity as guardians of Mankind’s art, science and knowledge. They tried to hush it up, and among themselves they blamed the whole affair on the organic components of the Rainbow.
 

But the details leaked out, of course. Legends grew from rumors, and the minstrels and the bards pieced them together. The Story of Brutus became an important part of The Song of Earth, and his name became a symbol of compassion through all of Late Earth.
 

The Triad sat in the Rainbow Room. The Girl was at the console, finishing up the work she’d begun on Dream Earth, but now from a position of some power. On stage, the Dream People went about their business in surprisingly placid fashion. A group of them seemed to be building a house with bricks and mortar and sawn lumber. And nearby, in a sunny meadow, a few Dreamers were involved in a chess tournament. No gaudy costumes were on view, and the lack of outlandish scenes caused the Girl some satisfaction. It was uncannily quiet, and she was struck by how few people there were. Scanning, she saw mountains and forests in the distance, people talking, laughing, building and creating, but no monsters and no fighting.
 

Zozula watched too, but in his mind’s eye he saw a different scene. It was a scene he would remember all his life...
 

The buildings had soared into the stratosphere, slender and pointed, pink and blue. The ships were like birds spiraling in from the Greataway, graceful and fragile, circling the minarets and landing like leaves on floating pads from which stairways hung. The people who emerged from these ships were beau-tiful—young and slim, dancing lightly down the stairways, leading strange beasts from other worlds into the towers. From the tallest building another stairway twisted upward, and although Zozula had reactivated the focus, he’d been unable to discern where it led.
 

That was days ago, and it didn’t matter now because it would all disappear. And there never were any True Humans there, anyway.
 

Manuel said, “I’m going home now.”
 

Zozula looked at him in surprise. “You’re very welcome to stay, Manuel. We have work to do, soon. We have to search for True Humans—they’re out there somewhere. Your Belinda proved that.”
 

“I don’t think she was a True Human,” said Manuel. “And anyway, you don’t need me. You people can do anything. You travel to other worlds. You can ride the Skytrain, and the shuttle to the People Planet, and you can...” Running out of words, Manuel waved at the interior of the Rainbow Room, with its banks of instruments, all wonderful, all incomprehensible, and at the magical Dream Earth display.
 

Zozula said gently, “Please believe me, Manuel—we’re simple fools, we Cuidadors. Only the Rainbow is clever. So clever that we have no means of fully understanding it. We can only snatch at fragments of knowledge, which we’ll have forgotten by tomorrow; the Rainbow never forgets. We’re only humans, like you. We aren’t gods, even though we might delude ourselves sometimes. Yes, Selena travels to the People Planet on the shuttle.” He touched a panel and Dream Earth disappeared. The lights of the Rainbow shifted and coalesced into a view that Manuel recognized: the night sky. Then the stars grew, billowing from the Rainbow in great clouds as though driven by the cosmic wind like sparks from some primal fire. Soon the room was full of stars, all around them and beneath their feet, too, so that they seemed to be suspended in the Greataway. Manuel gulped with vertigo.
 

“Manuel, look at the very bright stars,” Zozula continued. “See that one? And that? Those are the nearby planets, and they all orbit our sun... there.” The planets became more distinct against the backdrop of stars, so that even little Pluto was clear and the sun a burning orb.
 

“One of those planets—or perhaps a satellite of one—is the People Planet. Selena travels there often to look after the creatures there...
 

“
But we don’t know which is the People Planet.
We know Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. We know the moons of each, and we know the larger asteroids. Every few days Selena and Brutus climb aboard the shuttle and press a button, and later they find themselves on the People Planet. But we don’t know where they go. Oh, the data’s there somewhere, in some bank of the Rainbow. But where, and how to retrieve it? Nobody knows, not even me, and I’m the programmer—
 

“Programmer!” Zozula uttered a bark of laughter. “I’ve never written a program in my life, and I wouldn’t know what one looked like. The Rainbow is
old
, Manuel. Almost as old as Mankind—it started to be built somewhere around the year 53,000 Cyclic. Imagine that! It knows too much for our minds to comprehend. It records everything that happens on Earth, and it thinks, and it weighs alternatives, but it hardly ever
does
anything. It just waits for us to tell it what to do.
 

“And we don’t know how to tell it. It’s all too complicated for our minds. I’m sure it knows where we can find True Humans, but I don’t know how to ask it. I’m hoping the Mole does, wherever he is.
 

“Don’t be overawed by us, Manuel. We’d be very glad to have you stay with us and help us.”
 

But Manuel had made his decision. He picked up the Simulator and kissed the Girl on the cheek. She frowned, pretending to concentrate on the console. “Goodbye, Girl,” he said. “Come and see me if you get the chance. And...” He hesitated, then clasped Zozula’s hand, rather to the surprise of the old man. “And you too, Zozula. You’re welcome at my place any time.”
 

“I think we’ll be meeting again,” said the Cuidador.
 

“Possibly,” said Manuel, looking from him to the Girl. “Yes, I’m sure we shall.” He seemed oddly cheerful. Whistling, he sauntered off down the Rainbow Room, and for a short while passed out of their lives.
 

Zozula looked after him. “He’s a funny boy.”
 

“He’ll be back,” said the Girl, “after he’s searched for Belinda in his own way. He’s not a follower, Zozula—hadn’t you noticed that? And he has to get this quest out of his system before he can help us. You know...” she hesitated, “I think he knows something we don’t, and he’s going to check it out.”
 

Zozula was convinced and oddly comforted by her certainty. She was often right about this kind of thing. Feeling better, he departed to let the other Cuidadors know that the Girl was back in charge of Dream Earth and that the memory banks and other parts of the Rainbow would be more accessible, now that the Mole was in there. Everything was working well again, and a little robot wheeled up and offered him a drink in answer to his slight gesture. As he rode a radius, he planned his little speech. It wouldn’t be too presumptuous, he thought, to refer to this as the dawning of a new era...
 

Now the search for True Humans could really begin.
 

The Girl sat at the console, smiling to herself. All was well, and, in the Ifalong, all would be even better. Manuel hadn’t found Belinda yet and she did-n’t think he ever would. His fun would be in the searching. And at the end, he would still be around—and so would the Girl. And he would need comforting.
 

But she was a neotenite. Her life in Dream Earth had taught her that nothing is impossible, and that people need not be trapped forever within their own bodies. One way or another there was always room for a little loving cheating, a white lie or two, an illusion...