By WALTER MILLER, JR.
Emilish knew that Man had conquered Space—he was to find that Man had lost the Earth!
FOR five subjective centuries she had lived, although Earth had aged half a million years since she had left it. She remembered Earth, now that she was dying on the parched yellow soil of Sorcerer VI. She remembered, and complained like an old hag of her fate, and the fate of her race. Her voice was a thin whine, and her face was cracked and haggard by the ages as she pleaded with him.
"Take me back, Emilesh—to Earth !"
"Yes, Motar," purred the young man who knelt beside her pallet.
"Not here—don't bury me here."
"No, Motar."
She wheezed weakly and stared beyond the window-slit toward the blue-green sky where blazed the Sorcerer and Sorcerer's wife—twin suns, pale yellow giant and blue-white dwarf, devouring one another in a close orbital embrace.
"Man is no longer Man," complained the old woman.
"I don't understand," murmured her son.
She stared at him with dull violet eyes, faded by the years. "How old are you, Emilesh?"
He made a choking sound in his throat. She was fading fast, becoming delirious perhaps.
"I am only fifty, Motar."
"You do not remember Earth."
"No. But I remember Viking II, and you said—"
"It is not like Earth. There is but one Earth! Made for Man. And Man made it Earth, but he is gone."
"Not gone, Motar. He has won space."
She hissed a low sigh and closed her eyes. "You cannot understand."
"Tell me, Motar." He leaned forward to blot a fleck of pink foam from her cracked lips.
"Give into the hands of one man great power—and Men become slaves."
"It is true."
"Give all men great power—and Man becomes a slave."
"I do not understand."
She raised herself up on a quaking arm and stared at him with wild eyes. Her voice crept a note higher.
"But give each man, every man, great power—and Man passes away. He dies. Do you understand ?"
"No, Motar."
She crumpled back on the pillow and closed her eyes. "What is society, Emilesh ?"
He paused, bewildered. "There is the Liberty Drive Society on Todmacht V. And the Funph Corporation that owns Darkon VII and manufacturers energy-triggers for the five-space drive. And—"
"No, Emilesh—your society. Where is your society?"
He straightened his shoulders proudly and smiled. "I am owned by no corporation, Motar! You know that! I am free lance."
She turned her face to the wall.
"Where is your law?"
"Law—law? I—"
"You have forgotten the word."
"Perhaps, Motar—I—"
Her breathing became louder, faster. "Take me to Earth, Emilesh."
"I shall."
"Scatter my ashes there—where Man —still—"
HER voice trailed off. He sat staring at her for a long time. Then he arose and went out to stand in the yellow dust and watch the setting of Sorcerer and Sorcerer's wife. The sky went orange and gray, and at last the ten thousand suns of Cluster Regenesis winked out to gleam like the eyes of dorquebirds, squatting in their nests of planets. And beyond the stars of the cluster, the nebulous band of the Milky Way streaked the blackness, its glowing belt splotched and blotted by the Great Rift. Beyond the galactic nucleus, beyond the dust screens of the Rift, far out in an arm of the galactic spiral, lay Sol—class G star, magnitude 4.8, main sequence—invisible, insignificant.
At midnight, the smoke of a funeral pyre darkened the stars. Before dawn, he burned the house, as a place of death. And there was no one but Emilesh to watch it crumble in ashes on that sea-bound continent of Sorcerer VI. Then he went to the ship.
He went alone with Motar's ashes, for he had not yet captured himself a wife, and he would not trade his freedom as free lance for any woman offered as enticement by the corporate societies. He preferred to live alone as wanderer, exploiter, trader—until he happened upon the camp of an equally lonely female.
It was a hard thing Motar had asked of him, hard because it would cost him five years of aging in hypnohibernosis while the time-lag would drink up several hundred centuries of galactic local time. He would return to a different era, but that mattered little. They had done it several times during Motar's subjective lifetime.
He placed the ashes in a sealed vault and strapped himself in the recline-seat. A microphone lowered itself before his face.
"Sybern Seven, answer please."
"I am hearing," grated the metallic voice.
"Have you a star in your memory called Sol?"
"Pause for scanning."
There was a silence in the small ship. Then—
"Negative. It is perhaps listed by sector desigation?"
The suggestion was followed by a click and a sliding sound. A thick volume appeared at his elbow. He shuffled the pages, then read aloud: "It has been renamed. Oculus Christi Regis, 10,400 parsecs, 1.51 radians. It is our destination, Sybern Seven."
"Please designate planet," croaked the robot.
Emilesh paused. "I believe it is the fourth—no, the third. Chose a temperate land-mass for landing. Now prepare me for hypno-hybernosis."
The couch was moist beneath him. A mist arose about him, collected on his skin, congealed to form a warm oily membrane. He closed his eyes. Steel fingers encircled his wrists. A needle touched the hollow of his arm, probed deep into a vein. He felt lighter. Another touched his chest. A jab of pain caused him to yelp. And then the needle glided gently between ribs. His pulse began to lag, his breathing slowed. A blinding point of light danced in his waning consciousness. Somewhere—far away—the thunder of rockets.
"It is still and silent in the womb," droned a voice. "It is warm and black in the womb. Still and silent. Warm and black. Very heavy."
Emilesh slept.
THERE was silence; darkness and silence. A breath of fresh night air reached his nostrils, cool and pleasant about his face. He lifted his head. Faint moonlight was splashing through the open airlock. He heard the quiet chirp of insects and the distant howl of an animal.
"Where are we?" he groaned weakly.
"Oculus Christi Regis III. Am I permitted to retire from consciousness?"
"Retire."
He unbuckled himself and sat for a long time working his joints. The electro-stimulators had been at work on him while he slept, but they were no substitute for active exercise. He was weak and sick and a dull ache pervaded his bones.
He arose and staggered to the airlock. In the night wind, some of the sickness passed. He stared about at the moonswept landscape.
Earth! Earth after six hundred thousand years.
Sybern had landed at the edge of a grove atop a flat hill. At the foot of the slope flowed a narrow river, clothed along its length in bunches of black trees through which reflected moonlight peeped.
He left Motar's ashes in their vault and slid down to stand on the rocky ground. Earth! He could feel it, a sense of rightness, of belonging here. The way the wind came, and its smell, and the rustle of the trees in the grove. They stirred memories, and he tried to think, but there were no memories.
"I have never been here," he reminded himself.
Born in space, grown to manhood in the heart of the galaxy, memories of Earth were impossible to him. But the feeling of memory was there, and he wondered over it. He stooped and gathered up a handful of the hard soil—grass-roots, and moist sand, and broken bits of soft rock. He squeezed it in his fist, and it felt right. Strange! Did the feeling of memory spring out of the depths of a race-mind, arise out of the sub-structure of a forest-bred species?
He crumbled the earth in his fist and thought, "I am made of this stuff." Then he walked to a place where the slope steepened, and looked out beyond the river, across billowing grassland into gray distance, dimmed by moonlit mist. There were no lights. Emilesh, whose beginnings lay beyond the Great Rift, had somehow known that there would be no lights on Earth.
He looked upward to the thinly scattered stars, Man's lights, sprinkled across the galaxy like flaming chaff in the wind. Who had stood on the hill before him in ages past—and longed for the stars? Who had dreamed here?
The visitor smiled faintly, drinking in his oneness with the soil, with the wind and its odor of Autumn. He wondered if the dreamer had understood the thing he wanted, and the thing he intended giving up. Flesh, torn from the planet of its birth, found freedom in space; freedom but not contentment. He shivered.
It was dangerous to stand here. He must not linger. Earth was cast in the image of Man. If he stayed too long, he might never escape her. He turned quickly back toward the ship, and stopped.
A slender white figure stood by the airlock in the moonlight. A human figure! He groped for his holster, but it was inside the ship. He stood staring dumbly at the motionless figure of a woman, unclad and silent as the earth.
HE WALKED slowly toward her, his boot-heels crunching in the ground. He stopped a few feet away. She had not moved, only watched him. Her hair was close-cropped, and black as the night. Her face was an oval shadow, with a spot of brightness on the tip of her nose. She was well-formed, with soft white limbs and a high bosom that longed for children. She tossed her head a little, and he could see that she was smiling at him. But her eyes caught a flash of the moon, and they gleamed for a moment like cat's eyes.
The thought came like a whisper, but it was soundless.
"I am Eva. Have you come to bury your dead, Wanderer ?"
For an instant he felt his scalp crawling. He had met telepathic races, but never a human so endowed. But then he remembered. Hundreds of thousands of years had passed by the Earth-clock, time for evolution to be at work. A telepath—and he had hardly expected to find any remnants of humanity.
"Give me your dead, Wanderer," purred the thought. "And I shall tend the grave."
He gasped a little, and leaped to a conclusion: others had returned before him—bringing the remains of their ancestors to rest in the soil of Oculus Christi Regis III.
"Tending graves, is it your duty?" he muttered.
She stepped back, as if frightened by the sound. She moistened her lips and nodded, but her eyes were gleaming curiously again. He knew then that she did not understand his speech, but only the thought that accompanied it. A telepath—she had forgotten how to speak. He lowered his voice to a whisper.
"What do you ask in barter? In exchange for allowing me to scatter my motar's ashes here?"
By her answering jumble of thought, he knew she failed to understand. Still, if her duty was that of grave-tender, he could only conclude that some corporate enterprise had seized Earth as a burial ground. "Give me your dead," was her only intelligible reaction.
Emilesh shook his head. His scalp was tingling again. The thought had seemed so eager. He pushed his way past her and entered the airlock. A few minutes later he returned with the urn, and she was still standing there. She saw it, and opened her hands as if to take it.
"No!"
The girl backed away, stared at him somberly: Then her pale marble shoulders lifted in a faint shrug.
"I'm sorry I spoke sharply. I—"
She turned away slowly and began walking toward the blackness of the grove, her body swaying gracefully in the moonlight. She was beautifully formed, and Emilesh realized suddenly what he had done. After many years searching free lance planets for a mate. . . .
"Wait!"
The girl walked gracefully on. He started after her, then glanced down at the urn in his arms. There would be time to find her later. He had come to bring Motar home.
He walked through thickening brush down the slope to the bank of the river, and the ground became soft and wet beneath his feet. Far out in the silvery water a fish leaped high and splashed again. He held the urn high in the wind, let it tilt, and slowly spill a stream of dust that whipped away and became invisible in the lustrous gloom.
"Break the urn," whispered a voice in his mind, and he knew the girl was watching from the hilltop.
He shattered it over his knee, and the pieces that remained in his hands he threw out into the river. Motar had returned to Earth. A dust, the substance of whose longing was so great that it demanded passage across ten thousand parsecs to be united with the dust of Earth again.
HE TURNED away and climbed the slope, pausing twice to rest, for the long endurance of hypnohibernosis had weakened him. He dare not leave again until his strength returned—weeks perhaps.
Back at the ship, he called to the girl, but she did not answer. He tried calling with his mind alone, but there was no answering thought. She had been watching him when he was at the river's edge. She could not be far. He walked toward the grove, seeking her, his mind toying with the thought of taking her as mate. . . . if she would go with him, or at least if she did not object too violently to being captured.
The rustling trees closed over him, and only slender shafts of moonlight penetrated the foliage. The undergrowth was sparse; man had trained his planet well.
"Eva—"
No answer. The woods were full of tiny sounds, twitterings and scamperings in the brush. He paused to peer about him.
Then he saw the eyes, glowing softly by a treetrunk. He stepped quickly toward them.
"Eva—"
AhhrrRRRAAUGHrr!
A thundering roar split the night. He stumbled and lurched back. The eyes belonged to a giant cat. He clawed for the missing weapon, then darted for a treetrunk. But he paused. The animal was doing nothing. Suddenly the eyes disappeared, and he heard the creature lumbering away through the brush. It had not molested him. Why?
"You are Man," came the girl's thought.
He leaned against the tree, panting slightly while he recovered his composure. A thrill shot through him. He had walked on many planets, fled from many beasts, and killed a few. But never had he met a giant carnivore who would turn and walk away from the pale and hated biped.
"He hates you," called the whisperer, "but he knows you for who you are."
He shook his head in wonder. Even the beasts remembered.
"Where are you?" he called to the girl. "Come. Let us talk."
Her answer was slow in coming. Had she heard his thoughts about a mate?
"It is best that you go quickly from this world, Space-animal."
The name shocked him. She had called him "Man" before.
"You—are—human, still?" he muttered suspiciously.
"We are both of Man. But we are different."
"The same species—"
"No."
"The same flesh—"
"Yes—" But her thought was like bitter laughter.
"Come out."
For a long time he stood waiting. But she neither came nor answered him. He sighed and turned away, walked slowly back through the woods and across the narrow clearing to the ship.
THE singing of birds awoke him. The Earth was full of bright yellow sunshine. A large blue insect buzzed in through the air-lock, wheeled in a crazy circle and buzzed out again. Emilesh sat up and shook the sleep from his head. He felt fine, refreshed. He was still weak from hypno, but never had he felt such rapid recovery. The air of Earth, mother of his race, was sweet medicine indeed. He groped sleepily for his clothing, then pushed it aside. It was too warm for anything more than a short kilt.
A bundle lay in the airlock—a bundle wrapped in leaves. He frowned in bewilderment, then went to stoop over it. The fragrant odor of fresh-cooked meat. He stripped away the leaves and found the roasted carcass of a small mammal. Still puzzled, he glanced up toward the grove.
Whispering laughter floated through his mind. The girl. He thought a grateful exclamation at her and tore off a succulent hindquarter.
"Come join me," he offered.
There was a long pause. Then her graceful white figure slipped out of the trees and came toward him with the swaying catlike walk. He stopped eating to stare. She was perfect—a narrow doll-like face with upturned features and hazel eyes. He was uncomfortably aware of her body, and he kept his eyes averted lest he think some thought to embarrass her.
He offered her some of the meat she had brought him, but her dark head shook in quick refusal.
"I do not eat of the dead."
He dropped the hind-quarter quickly and stared at her. The tingling in his scalp again.
"What is it?" he demanded.
She thought an image at him—a small brown animal with a short fluffy tail and long ears. The image was nibbling a grass-blade.
"Only an animal," he grunted, recovering.
"It is forbidden for the grave-tenders to eat of the dead."
A sanctity rule of the corporate society, he thought to himself. She seemed to catch the thought, but made no reply —only watched him curiously as he ate.
"You are different," she thought at last.
Emilesh looked up quickly. She had told him that before, but now he detected a certain qualitative note in the assertation—a note that tended to point out where she thought the difference lay.
"You have never seen a male!" he gasped.
The loudness of his voice frightened her and she inched away. The words meant nothing to her, but the mental images that accompanied them seemed to disturb her deeply.
Then suddenly she thought a timid question at him, and he gasped. It was little short of obscene! The girl caught his reaction. She leaped nimbly to her feet and darted away toward the forest.
"Eva, wait!"
But she was gone. He cursed himself for a moment. It was not obscene, but only the bluntness of complete ignorance. He called after her and tried to explain, but she had hidden in an embarrassed silence.
THREE days passed. He saw nothing of her, but at times he felt that his thoughts were being examined and studied from afar.
Nor did he see any other human beings. The broad flat plain beyond the river was an expanse of grassy emptiness. When the wind whipped the grass, tiny white stones sometimes peeped into view. They were rectangular and set vertically in the ground. Markers of some kind, he guessed—but there were so many of them, spaced two or three paces apart. And the grass seemed to grow higher in low mounds at the foot of each marker. They stretched beyond the range of his vision, and whatever their purpose, he guessed that the plain was completely covered with them.
He was walking far down along the river bank when he heard the girl call to him again. He had been gone perhaps an hour, and the ship lay far beyond him. He came to a mud flat that reached from the riverbank back to a low place in the forest, where apparently a brook emerged during the rainy season. The mud flat was only a stone's throw wide, and there were rocks set here and there in the ooze, so that it would be possible to cross by skipping from one to the next. He had just stepped on the first stone when the girl's thought struck him.
"No! Stay away! Do not cross!"
He turned to frown irritably toward the grove. She had been avoiding him for nearly a week, never answering when he called. He snorted and leaped to the next stone. It seemed to sink a little with his weight.
"No! Man-creature! There is danger!"
He paused to look around. There was nothing but the ooze of black stuff, steaming in the sun. The river to his right, and the forest to his left. He moved to make another leap. But the stone seemed to quake a little under his feet, and something touched his boot as if feeling of its texture.
Emilesh looked down. A hand—a fumbling hand! Covered with the sticky mud, it reached up out of the mire to fumble, and then to clutch at his ankle. He shrieked and kicked at it. Another appeared to grasp for a hold. He screamed and leaped for the bank, sprawling in the wet sand and clawing his way up the slope on hands and knees.
When he reached dry grass, he looked back. A head had reared itself up out of the morass. White eyes and gaping paws. It sucked in a loud breath and submerged itself again.
His flesh was crawling as he trotted back toward the safety of the ship. The thing in the mud was the flesh of man, tortured by six thousand centuries. Why not?—he thought—trying to console himself. Species evolved by splitting. The thing in the mud had taken the low road. Some form of adaptation to a threat that had long since vanished.
And the girl in the woods? The highroad?
"It is you, Emilesh, who have taken the road to the stars."
"Come show yourself!" he growled angrily.
But she was already sitting in the airlock of his ship, eyeing him with somber concern. "It is best that you go back."
IT WAS a moment before he realized she had whispered the words in accompaniment to her thought. And the words were real words, not mere sequences of thought images that suggested them. She had learned to speak, perhaps by probing his mind.
"You are pleased?"
He nodded and grinned at her.
"Will you go?"
He sat down in the sun and chewed a blade of grass. "I am still not fully recovered," he lied.
She shifted her body in the entranceway and crossed her long white legs. "You are wondering if I will go with you," she murmured wistfully.
He reddened. "Will you?"
"No. I am of Earth."
"So am I."
"We are different."
"How?"
She groped for words, and he felt the confusion in her mind. She stared at him for a time. "Your hair is yellow," she said.
Emilesh caught a fleeting impression that she only half understood the concept of "human", that in her mind "to be human" was to be exactly like herself, modified by the recent discoveries she had made concerning his sex.
"Tell me," he said gently, "when is the last time you saw a human being?"
She stared out across the grasslands. "I don't remember," she murmured. "Maybe never."
"Where were you born?"
"I don't know."
A suspicion that had been gnawing at his mind crept into consciousness again. He tried to suppress it, but the girl looked at him sharply.
"You're thinking perhaps I was never born. You're thinking I was—made."
"Are you an android?" he breathed.
"I don't know."
"How long have you lived?"
She shook her head slowly. She didn't know.
"Do you remember being a child?"
Her shudder was a visible thing. Her face drained of color, and an impenetrable wall closed about her mind. But in an instant before the curtain dropped, he caught a glimpse. She had been a child, long ago. And she refused to remember the horror of it.
"Why do you torment me so?" She was gazing at him evenly, but with reproof in the cool green eyes.
Emilesh crossed to her quickly and caught her cool shoulders in his hands. "Come with me, Eva."
"No. I am of Earth." She cast her eyes skyward, as if afraid. "You are an animal out of space. I am an animal of the ground."
But he saw that if he decided to take her, she would not resist. Still he wondered. Why had some men lingered on the planet after the Liberty Drive ? But of course, some would always linger, clinging ever more tightly to the Earth as each succeeding generation drained away those who were willing to go. And soon there would be only those who were incapable of leaving.
Like the creatures who lived in the mud ...
She caught the thought. She stood up and walked away from him. Down the slope toward the river.
"Eva, where are you going?"
No answer. She walked on with lazy catlike grace until she came to the bank. He watched with a puzzled frown. Suddenly she dived into the water, and he started a few steps after her. But she surfaced quickly and began swimming toward the opposite bank.
"Eva, wait!"
She climbed out on the opposite bank and disappeared into the brush. He called after again, but it was no use. He turned toward the ship.
SUDDENLY the image struck him, and he closed his eyes. She was thinking of the mud-flat. Of a group of gibbering, writhing bodies milling toward the bank, bearing a screaming child. The child was human, but streaked with the smelly ooze of the flat. The mud-creatures threw the child out bodily onto the bank. It whimpered and crawled back in the mud, pleading with them and wailing. They cast it forth again and again, until bruised and crying softly, it crawled away through the high grass toward the forest. He felt some of its pain—desperation at being unwanted ... By its parents!
Because it was different!
He sat down in a sick heap. She was a child of the mud-beings—a throwback across half-a-million years.
"I am sorry, Emilesh. I wanted to go with you."
Glumly he climbed in through the airlock and began making preparations for his departure. She was right. She was of the soil, he of space. And he remembered Motar's words—about the package-sized Liberty Drive : Give each man, every man, great power—and Man will pass away.
By freedom unlimited.
He caught another glimpse of her before he blasted off from the hillside on Oculus Christi Regis III. She was a tiny doll-like figure across the river in the field of high grass. She was bending over, working among the white marble markers. He caught a thread of her thought, and understood what she was doing. She was digging a grave. Her own. She liked working in the earth.
"Destination : Sorcerer VI," growled the space-animal.
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