18.
And this is how it was. We were deep in the Spook Cluster now, and the Vainglory Archipelago burned bright on my realspace screen. Somewhere down there was the planet called Cul-de-Sac. Before we came to worldward of it, Vox would have to slip away into the great night of heaven.
Making a worldward approach is perhaps the most difficult maneuver a starship must achieve; and the captain must go to the edge of his abilities along with everyone else. Novice at my trade though I was, I would be called on to perform complex and challenging processes. If I failed at them, other crewmen might cut in and intervene, or, if necessary, the ship’s intelligences might override; but if that came to pass my career would be destroyed, and there was the small but finite possibility, I suppose, that the ship itself could be gravely damaged or even lost.
I was determined, all the same, to give Vox the best send-off I could.
On the morning of our approach I stood for a time on Outerscreen Level, staring down at the world that called itself Cul-de-Sac. It glowed like a red eye in the night. I knew that it was the world Vox had chosen for herself, but all the same it seemed repellent to me, almost evil. I felt that way about all the worlds of the shore people now. The Service had changed me; and I knew that the change was irreversible. Never again would I go down to one of those worlds. The starship was my world now.
I went to the virtuality where Vox was waiting.
“Come,” I said, and she entered me.
Together we crossed the ship to the Great Navigation Hall.
The approach team had already gathered: Raebuck, Fresco, Roacher, again, along with Pedregal, who would supervise the downloading of cargo. The intelligence on duty was 612 Jason. I greeted them with quick nods and we jacked ourselves together in approach series.
Almost at once I felt Roacher probing within me, searching for the fugitive intelligence that he still thought I might be harboring. Vox shrank back, deep out of sight. I didn’t care. Let him probe, I thought. This will all be over soon.
“Request approach instructions,” Fresco said.
“Simulation,” I ordered.
The fiery red eye of Cul-de-Sac sprang into vivid representation before us in the hall. On the other side of us was the simulacrum of the ship, surrounded by sheets of white flame that rippled like the blaze of the aurora.
I gave the command and we entered approach mode.
We could not, of course, come closer to planetskin than a million shiplengths, or Cul-de-Sac’s inexorable forces would rip us apart. But we had to line the ship up with its extended mast aimed at the planet’s equator, and hold ourselves firm in that position while the shoreships of Cul-de-Sac came swarming up from their red world to receive their cargo from us.
612 Jason fed me the coordinates and I gave them to Fresco, while Raebuck kept the channels clear and Roacher saw to it that we had enough power for what we had to do. But as I passed the data along to Fresco, it was with every sign reversed. My purpose was to aim the mast not downward to Cul-de-Sac but outward toward the stars of heaven.
At first none of them noticed. Everything seemed to be going serenely. Because my reversals were exact, only the closest examination of the ship’s position would indicate our 180-degree displacement.
Floating in the free fall of the Great Navigation Hall, I felt almost as though I could detect the movements of the ship. An illusion, I knew. But a powerful one. The vast ten-kilometer-long needle that was the Sword of Orion seemed to hang suspended, motionless, and then to begin slowly, slowly to turn, tipping itself on its axis, reaching for the stars with its mighty mast. Easily, easily, slowly, silently—
What joy that was, feeling the ship in my hand!
The ship was mine. I had mastered it.
“Captain,” Fresco said softly.
“Easy on, Fresco. Keep feeding power.”
“Captain, the signs don’t look right—”
“Easy on. Easy.”
“Give me a coordinates check, Captain.”
“Another minute,” I told him.
“But—”
“Easy on, Fresco.”
Now I felt restlessness too from Pedregal, and a slow chilly stirring of interrogation from Raebuck; and then Roacher probed me again, perhaps seeking Vox, perhaps simply trying to discover what was going on. They knew something was wrong, but they weren’t sure what it was.
We were nearly at full extension, now. Within me there was an electrical trembling: Vox rising through the levels of my mind, nearing the surface, preparing for departure.
“Captain, we’re turned the wrong way!” Fresco cried.
“I know,” I said. “Easy on. We’ll swing around in a moment.”
“He’s gone crazy!” Pedregal blurted.
I felt Vox slipping free of my mind. But somehow I found myself still aware of her movements, I suppose because I was jacked into 612 Jason and 612 Jason was monitoring everything. Easily, serenely, Vox melted into the skin of the ship.
“Captain!” Fresco yelled, and began to struggle with me for control.
I held the navigator at arm’s length and watched in a strange and wonderful calmness as Vox passed through the ship’s circuitry all in an instant and emerged at the tip of the mast, facing the stars. And cast herself adrift.
Because I had turned the ship around, she could not be captured and acquired by Cul-de-Sac’s powerful navigational grid, but would be free to move outward into heaven. For her it would be a kind of floating out to sea, now. After a time she would be so far out that she could no longer key into the shipboard bioprocessors that sustained the patterns of her consciousness, and, though the web of electrical impulses that was the Vox matrix would travel outward and onward forever, the set of identity responses that was Vox herself would lose focus soon, would begin to waver and blur. In a little while, or perhaps not so little, but inevitably, her sense of herself as an independent entity would be lost. Which is to say, she would die.
I followed her as long as I could. I saw a spark traveling across the great night. And then nothing.
“All right,” I said to Fresco. “Now let’s turn the ship the right way around and give them their cargo.”
19.
That was many years ago. Perhaps no one else remembers those events, which seem so dreamlike now even to me. The Sword of Orion has carried me nearly everywhere in the galaxy since then. On some voyages I have been captain; on others, a downloader, a supercargo, a mind-wiper, even sometimes a push-cell. It makes no difference how we serve, in the Service.
I often think of her. There was a time when thinking of her meant coming to terms with feelings of grief and pain and irrecoverable loss, but no longer, not for many years. She must be long dead now, however durable and resilient the spark of her might have been. And yet she still lives. Of that much I am certain. There is a place within me where I can reach her warmth, her strength, her quirky vitality, her impulsive suddenness. I can feel those aspects of her, those gifts of her brief time of sanctuary within me, as a living presence still, and I think I always will, as I make my way from world to tethered world, as I journey onward everlastingly spanning the dark light-years in this great ship of heaven.
HOUSE OF BONES
Terry Carr was a first-rate editor, responsible for such masterpieces of science fiction as The Left Hand of Darkness, And Chaos Died, and Neuromancer. He was a much underrated writer, too, who published one classic story (“The Dance of the Changer and the Three”) and a number of fine ones that received less attention than they deserved. He was also a warmhearted, funny, decent human being who was one of my closest friends for almost thirty years.
The one thing he wasn’t was physically durable. Though he was tall and athletic-looking, his body began to give out by the time he was about forty-five, and in the spring of 1987 he died, two months after his fiftieth birthday, after a melancholy period of accelerating decline that for the most part had remained unknown outside his immediate circle.
Bet
h Meacham, then the editor-in-chief at Tor Books, was one of many in the science-fiction field who had learned her craft by working with Terry and by emulating his precepts. In the weeks after his death she sought to find some way of showing her gratitude to him, and in May, 1987, she hit upon the idea of assembling an anthology of original stories by writers who had had some professional association with Terry and who felt that his impact on their careers had been substantial. I was one of those that Beth invited to contribute, along with Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, and a dozen or so others.
I had just finished writing “House of Bones.” Terry was keenly interested in prehistory, and had a fundamental belief that human beings were basically good, however unlikely that might seem if one judged by outward appearance alone. “House of Bones” seemed to me to be the perfect story for the memorial anthology, and I sent it to Beth. Terry’s Universe was published in May of 1988, thirteen months after his death. “House of Bones” was the first story in the book.
——————
After the evening meal Paul starts tapping on his drum and chanting quietly to himself, and Marty picks up the rhythm, chanting too. And then the two of them launch into that night’s installment of the tribal epic, which is what happens, sooner or later, every evening.
It all sounds very intense but I don’t have a clue to the meaning. They sing the epic in the religious language, which I’ve never been allowed to learn. It has the same relation to the everyday language, I guess, as Latin does to French or Spanish. But it’s private, sacred, for insiders only. Not for the likes of me.
“Tell it, man!” B.J. yells. “Let it roll!” Danny shouts.
Paul and Marty are really getting into it. Then a gust of fierce stinging cold whistles through the house as the reindeer-hide flap over the doorway is lifted, and Zeus comes stomping in.
Zeus is the chieftain. Big burly man, starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time. Despite the Paleolithic cold, all he’s wearing is a cloak of black fur, loosely draped. The thick hair on his heavy chest is turning gray too. Festoons of jewelry announce his power and status: necklaces of seashells, bone beads, and amber, a pendant of yellow wolf teeth, an ivory headband, bracelets carved from bone, five or six rings.
Sudden silence. Ordinarily when Zeus drops in at B.J.’s house it’s for a little roistering and tale-telling and butt-pinching, but tonight he has come without either of his wives, and he looks troubled, grim. Jabs a finger toward Jeanne.
“You saw the stranger today? What’s he like?”
There’s been a stranger lurking near the village all week, leaving traces everywhere—footprints in the permafrost, hastily covered-over campsites, broken flints, scraps of charred meat. The whole tribe’s keyed. Strangers aren’t common. I was the last one, a year and a half ago. God only knows why they took me in: because I seemed so pitiful to them, maybe. But the way they’ve been talking, they’ll kill this one on sight if they can. Paul and Marty composed a Song of the Stranger last week and Marty sang it by the campfire two different nights. It was in the religious language so I couldn’t understand a word of it. But it sounded terrifying.
Jeanne is Marty’s wife. She got a good look at the stranger this afternoon, down by the river while netting fish for dinner. “He’s short,” she tells Zeus. “Shorter than any of you, but with big muscles, like Gebravar.” Gebravar is Jeanne’s name for me. The people of the tribe are strong, but they didn’t pump iron when they were kids. My muscles fascinate them. “His hair is yellow and his eyes are gray. And he’s ugly. Nasty. Big head, big flat nose. Walks with his shoulders hunched and his head down.” Jeanne shudders. “He’s like a pig. A real beast. A goblin. Trying to steal fish from the net, he was. But he ran away when he saw me.”
Zeus listens, glowering, asking a question now and then—did he say anything, how was he dressed, was his skin painted in any way. Then he turns to Paul.
“What do you think he is?”
“A ghost,” Paul says. These people see ghosts everywhere. And Paul, who is the bard of the tribe, thinks about them all the time. His poems are full of ghosts. He feels the world of ghosts pressing in, pressing in. “Ghosts have gray eyes,” he says. “This man has gray eyes.”
“A ghost, maybe, yes. But what kind of ghost?”
“What kind?”
Zeus glares. “You should listen to your own poems,” he snaps. “Can’t you see it? This is a Scavenger Folk man prowling around. Or the ghost of one.”
General uproar and hubbub at that.
I turn to Sally. Sally’s my woman. I still have trouble saying that she’s my wife, but that’s what she really is. I call her Sally because there once was a girl back home who I thought I might marry, and that was her name, far from here in another geological epoch.
I ask Sally who the Scavenger Folk are.
“From the old times,” she says. “Lived here when we first came. But they’re all dead now. They—”
That’s all she gets a chance to tell me. Zeus is suddenly looming over me. He’s always regarded me with a mixture of amusement and tolerant contempt, but now there’s something new in his eye. “Here is something you will do for us,” he says to me. “It takes a stranger to find a stranger. This will be your task. Whether he is a ghost or a man, we must know the truth. So you, tomorrow: you will go out and you will find him and you will take him. Do you understand? At first light you will go to search for him, and you will not come back until you have him.”
I try to say something, but my lips don’t want to move. My silence seems good enough for Zeus, though. He smiles and nods fiercely and swings around, and goes stalking off into the night.
They all gather around me, excited in that kind of animated edgy way that comes over you when someone you know is picked for some big distinction. I can’t tell whether they envy me or feel sorry for me. B.J. hugs me, Danny punches me in the arm, Paul runs up a jubilant-sounding number on his drum. Marty pulls a wickedly sharp stone blade about nine inches long out of his kit-bag and presses it into my hand.
“Here. You take this. You may need it.”
I stare at it as if he had handed me a live grenade.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t know anything about stalking and capturing people.”
“Come on,” B.J. says. “What’s the problem?”
B.J. is an architect. Paul’s a poet. Marty sings, better than Pavarotti. Danny paints and sculpts. I think of them as my special buddies. They’re all what you could loosely call Cro-Magnon men. I’m not. They treat me just like one of the gang, though. We five, we’re some bunch. Without them I’d have gone crazy here. Lost as I am, cut off as I am from everything I used to be and know.
“You’re strong and quick,” Marty says. “You can do it.”
“And you’re pretty smart, in your crazy way,” says Paul. “Smarter than he is. We aren’t worried at all.”
If they’re a little condescending sometimes, I suppose I deserve it. They’re highly skilled individuals, after all, proud of the things they can do. To them I’m a kind of retard. That’s a novelty for me. I used to be considered highly skilled too, back where I came from.
“You go with me,” I say to Marty. “You and Paul both. I’ll do whatever has to be done but I want you to back me up.”
“No,” Marty says. “You do this alone.”
“B.J.? Danny?”
“No,” they say. And their smiles harden, their eyes grow chilly. Suddenly it doesn’t look so chummy around here. We may be buddies but I have to go out there by myself. Or I may have misread the whole situation and we aren’t such big buddies at all. Either way this is some kind of test, some rite of passage maybe, an initiation. I don’t know. Just when I think these people are exactly like us except for a few piddling differences of customs and languages, I realize how
alien they really are. Not savages, far from it. But they aren’t even remotely like modern people. They’re something entirely else. Their bodies and their minds are pure Homo sapiens but their souls are different from ours by 20,000 years.
To Sally I say, “Tell me more about the Scavenger Folk.”
“Like animals, they were,” she says. “They could speak but only in grunts and belches. They were bad hunters and they ate dead things that they found on the ground, or stole the kills of others.”
“They smelled like garbage,” says Danny. “Like an old dump where everything was rotten. And they didn’t know how to paint or sculpt.”
“This was how they screwed,” says Marty, grabbing the nearest woman, pushing her down, pretending to hump her from behind. Everyone laughs, cheers, stamps his feet.
“And they walked like this,” says B.J., doing an ape-shuffle, banging his chest with his fists.
There’s a lot more, a lot of locker-room stuff about the ugly shaggy stupid smelly disgusting Scavenger Folk. How dirty they were, how barbaric. How the pregnant women kept the babies in their bellies twelve or thirteen months and they came out already hairy, with a full mouth of teeth. All ancient history, handed down through the generations by bards like Paul in the epics. None of them has ever actually seen a Scavenger. But they sure seem to detest them.
“They’re all dead,” Paul says. “They were killed in the migration wars long ago. That has to be a ghost out there.”
Of course I’ve guessed what’s up. I’m no archaeologist at all—West Point, fourth generation. My skills are in electronics, computers, time-shift physics. There was such horrible political infighting among the archaeology boys about who was going to get to go to the past that in the end none of them went and the gig wound up going to the military. Still, they sent me here with enough crash-course archaeology to be able to see that the Scavengers must have been what we call the Neanderthals, that shambling race of also-rans that got left behind in the evolutionary sweepstakes.