Waiting for the Galactic Bus (4 page)

“Not stages, you idiot! Propensities!”

“Hush, be still. My subject’s coming.”

The ape moved cautiously to the water hole to drink, wary of the two still figures a little distance away, hissing a challenge out of a mouth and throat still limited in the sounds they could produce. Were she of an empirical bent, Charity Stovall might have been edified to know her direct ancestor was the smartest ape on its metaphorical block. Relative to body mass, the brain was already huge. Other survival traits would have sent Charity gibbering back to Genesis for reassurance.

Above all, the ape was marvelously adaptable. Omnivorous as a rodent, thriving on any food available. Three and a half feet tall: the most acquisitive, curious, aggressive, inventively vicious hominid Barion had ever found, and quite the hardiest on this violent world next to the cockroach and the rat. Long after this day’s work the ape would produce Christ, Beethoven, Auschwitz, thumbscrews and philosophy, Magna Carta and White Supremacy, poetry, poison gas, nuclear fission and romantic love. For the moment it crouched by the water hole, munching a succulent grub discovered under a stone, warning off the large creatures that somehow would not be frightened away. They were unclassifiable, therefore a threat. The ape made the brave noises of its kind.

“Good morning,” Barion said softly. “Welcome to evolution.”

The ape jumped at the sound, afraid but curious.

“I may be wrong about you. You and I have a great deal to learn.”

The ape made a clicking sound of puzzlement.

“You won’t understand any of this. Even when your mind is clear enough to send your little cutting stone to the moon and beyond, you’ll still wonder about this moment but never quite forget the truth of it. Wrap it in religion, a hundred flattering myths, in music, painting and exaltation of pure spirit —”

“Why all the lyrics?” Coyul wondered sourly. “You’re only giving it a boot in the evolutionary butt.”

“Can’t you see it? The implications, the greatest of all dramas, when life stands erect to contemplate itself —”

“My brother, the scientific lemming, headlong over the edge of folly. Don’t do it.”

“Shut up. This is
his
triumph: this one moment of knowing, when the atom contemplates an electron navel and finds worlds within worlds, will stay in that small brain forever. Your nature will always be to believe,” he prophesied to his quivering subject, “but your destiny always to question. I can’t make that any easier for you.”

Barion began to dissolve, flowing toward the creature. Coyul pleaded one last time. “Barion, don’t! It’s —”

Too late. His brother became a brief sparkle in sunlight before pouring into the little ape’s brain.

“— madness.”

Under the beetling brow, it —
he
 
—
blinked. A great light had flashed somewhere behind his eyes. Blood pounded in his ears. He was alone by the muddy water hole and still thirsty, but now, as he bent to drink, there was a difference. Always before, he’d seen the other creature come up to meet him out of the water, then vanish somehow in the small ripples caused by his drinking. The image had always frightened him; now he knew it was his own. He snarled at it, knowing he existed and would end, rejecting that horrible truth for all time with a howl of terror and rage and a primal loss he would labor through countless eons and creeds to rationalize and define. With all the terrible weight of consciousness,
knowing
he was. The beginnings of expression in the eyes, a dawn-sense of the tragedy Barion had taxed him with. As for the lost thing never to be found again, even his far-distant daughter Charity would call it the Fall.

Stunned by sentience, the miserable human did what came naturally — growled as Barion reappeared beside Coyul.

“Now you’ve done it,” Coyul reproached him with a full measure of disgust. “I don’t care if you are my brother. You’re a rotten kid.”

“We’ll see.” Barion inspected his handiwork like a critical painter gauging perspective on a canvas. Abruptly he swung away, covering the ground in great strides.

“Where are you off to now? Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“Got to do the same for his group,” Barion Sung back. “Can’t have him maundering around thinking all alone.”

“Fine... just fine.” Coyul dissolved to energy out of compassion for the miserable creature that Barion had just kicked upstairs. Whimpering with a new fear all the sharper for having no clear shape, the creature bowed his besieged head in hairy paws and felt vastly sorry for himself.

“All right,” Coyul sighed. “You’re a self. Suddenly apart where you used to be part of. I’d have left well enough alone.”

The same sympathy kept him from leaving the human, who was weeping now, already trying to make sounds for unguessed meanings.

“It’s not all bad. There’ll be insights now and then. I suppose there’s a chance.”

The pathetic human went on sniffling. He didn’t seem to know where he was anymore.

“Look, it’s not my fault, not up to me to help you at all. He shouldn’t have done it. So many other life forms more suited to sentience than you’ll ever be. Oh, stop whining, will you?”

The weeping human raised his blunt head at the sound of a distinct reluctant sigh. “All right — here: it’s the least I can do.”

Weeping made him feel thirsty again. As he bent to drink once more, knowing the reflected image for himself, fear transmuted to something lighter, the ugly sound of his sadness to an even more alien emotion. He couldn’t help it. The effort strained his throat that barely had the muscles for laughter.

So much for motivations. Barion wanted to win a science prize, Coyul only to go home and write music, but the thing was done. A great deal of bloodshed, art and religion would be perpetrated in both their names, and neither would be understood at all. As they had done to him, the human modified them to a lesser but more flattering truth he could live with.

Dazed, intermittently sobbing and laughing like a squeaky hinge, the creature deserted the water hole and scampered away toward history and other mixed blessings.

    4   

Topside/Below Stairs

The relief ship didn’t come.

And
didn’t
come.

A great deal of time went by. The Pole tilted, the ice came and went. Barion’s creature moved across the land and oceans, the skies, touched the moon and groped beyond. Barion began with a passionate belief, encouraged to vindication with every advance. Coyul took his own conclusions from the dismal weight of evidence.

Humans
were
dualistic. Consciously forgotten, the primitive eons still lurked in the subconscious, a huge dark forest against the small bright leaf of civilization. With new language they put new names to the gods of light and dark, put them at a distance but could not escape. Called the dark evil but found it always there inside them, a kind of spiritual schizophrenia. Persisted in seeing existence in terms of this struggle between “good “and “evil,” producing a great deal of belief, violence and, now and then, actual thought.

“The darkness will wear away,” Barion was certain.

“Sure,” said the dubious Coyul. “Any millennium now.”

And then a new problem cropped up in which dualism was only an aggravating part. Matter could be neither created nor destroyed. The human brain was matter that generated energy.

At a certain point in its evolution, a residue of personally defined energy began to stockpile, wanting somewhere to continue after physical death and, above all, something to do. Even Coyul had no flippant answer for the quandary. The small body of work their kind had done with the ill-regarded species never included sufficient follow-up on side effects. A few inspection reports on this post-existent energy pool (couched in
very
cautiously conservative terms) filtered in, were misinterpreted, buried and forgotten in the academic catacombs for irrelevant information and the pressure of more immediate problems at home. Barion never realized —

“They don’t die, Coyul. They just go
on.
And they keep asking about one god or another.”

“Me, too. I tell them I’m just waiting to go home. Then I tell them where home is and nobody believes me. For all their violence, they have a remarkable capacity for supine adoration. Throw’em a grand party; that always works.”

Worked for some and for a while. Egypt and Sumer passed. Most of them forgot about gods and creeds after a time and got on out of habit with the kind of life they’d known on Earth. Babylonians came, greased and gauded, brought wine and cheese and loved the party. Britons sang, Irish drank and mourned, Chinese discussed aesthetics, Indians chased phantom buffalo, Jews argued. Their combined energy was incredible, but Barion managed after a fashion, directing by indirection.

Then the Christians started to arrive, simple folk for the most part who didn’t want much. Nevertheless, the Apostles had definite and aggressive views, the martyrs felt they were owed the Presence of God and grew sharp with Barion, who was, to them, merely a ubiquitous handyman and certainly dressed like one. Unlike Coyul, Barion dressed for function, inventing denim ages before America popularized it.

Very few had the perception to discern Barion’s real power. One who did was a young Nazarene named Yeshua who had problems of his own in what people thought he was and expected of him.

“Sometimes,” he admitted to Barion, “I wish I’d minded my own business.”

“You
wish? Have you met Augustine yet?”

“I’ve avoided him,” said the candid Yeshua. “He doesn’t like Jews.”

“Well, he’s after me all the time about seeing God. And you: where and when does he come into the Presence?”

Yeshua gazed out over the grassy riverbank he and Barion had imagined for a few moments of relaxation. There was a directness to his glance and a stillness that the unsure found disturbing, the pompous insolent. “Just tell him you’re... You, I guess. Something.”

“You were an extraordinarily wise man in your time,” Barion said, “and even you had to use parables. You think Augustine, that doggedly passionate saint, would accept what I really am: a student from a galaxy on the other side of the universe and likely to be in a lot of trouble when I’m found? He’s growing insistent on seeing you, too. What he thinks you are.”

“He’d just be disappointed. They all are. A pity, too. I like being with people.” Yeshua rested his chin on drawn-up knees. “There’s one friend I’d give anything to see... talk to. He hasn’t come here.”

“Judas?” Barion guessed. “He’s with Coyul.”

“Judas could have understood the truth, but he ran from it.”

“You two!” The stentorian voice startled them.

Barion winced. “Speak of saints...”

“I would speak with you.” The short, bull-shouldered man in late Roman dress strode along the bank and halted before them, peremptory as a drill sergeant. His wide-set eyes gleamed with strength and the steely light of the Believer reborn from self-defined sin.

Nothing for it; Barion greeted him pleasantly. “Hello, Augustine.”

The Bishop of Hippo brushed the courtesy aside. “Give me no more excuses or subterfuge. Tell me where I may find what I have in life suffered, fought, endured enmity and slander for. Where — is — He?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“Oh, not again!”

“I’ve never seen him.” Barion shrugged, choosing his words carefully. Augustine was skilled in debate and played dirty. “But in time you’ll understand more than you did.”

Augustine bridled: a strong, courageous but narrow man. “I need no nondescript porter in outlandish garb to give me understanding. Where, then, is my Lord, Jesus Christ?”

“Visiting a troubled friend,” Yeshua volunteered truthfully.

Augustine, that most embattled of the early saints, subjected Yeshua to disdainful scrutiny from the sensitive face to the provincial garb of Galilee. “And here another riddle. I do not understand, among other mysteries sufficient to drive the Faithful to drink or women, why
you
people are suffered to remain here. You destroy, you question everything and accept nothing. When Christ offered you salvation, you spit on it and nailed Him to a cross.”