“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I helped dig it—Before sunup? That’s impossible. The sun was up when we went to sleep, right here.” Then I said, “Dead?”
Little Jon nodded. “Like Friza. The same way. That’s what La Dire said.”
I stood up, holding my blade tight. “But that’s impossible!” Somebody saying, Wait till it gets light enough so you’ll know I’m here. “Le Dorik was with me after sunrise. That’s when we lay down here to sleep.”
“You slept with Le Dorik after Le Dorik was dead?” Nativia asked, wonderingly.
Bewildered, I returned to the village. La Dire and Lo Hawk met me at the source-cave. We spoke together a bit; I watched them thinking deeply about things I didn’t understand, about my bewilderment.
“You’re a good hunter, Lo Lobey,” Lo Hawk said at last, “and though a bit outsized below the waist, a fair specimen of a man. You have much danger ahead of you; I’ve taught you much. Remember it when you wander by the rim of night or the edge of morning.” Apparently Le Dorik’s death had convinced him there was something to La Dire’s suppositions, though I understood neither side of the argument nor the bridge between. They didn’t enlighten me. “Use what I have taught you to get where you are going,” Lo Hawk went on, “to survive your stay, and make your way back.”
“You are different.” That is what La Dire said. “You have seen it is dangerous to be so. It is also very important. I have tried to instruct you in a view of the world large enough to encompass the deeds you will do as well as their significance. You have learned much, Lo Lobey. Use what I have taught you too.”
With no idea where I was going, I turned and staggered away, still dazed by Dorik’s death before sunrise. Apparently the Bloi triplets had been up all night fishing for blind-crabs in the mouth of the source-cave stream. They’d come back while it was still dark, swinging their hand-beams and joking as they walked up from the river—Dorik behind the wire in a net of shadow, circled with their lights, face down at the grave’s edge! It must have been just moments after I first left.
I wheeled through the brambles, heading toward noon, with one thought clearing, as figures on a stream bed clear when you brush back the bubbles a moment: if Le Dorik, dead, had walked with me a while (“I’m showing you now, Lobey”), walked through dawn and gorse, curled on a stone under new sunlight, then Friza too could travel with me. If I could find what killed those of us who were different, but whose difference gave us a reality beyond dying—
A slow song now on my blade to mourn Dorik; and the beat of my feet on earth in journey. After a few hours of such mourning, the heat had polished me with sweat as in some funeral dance.
While day leaned over the hills I passed the first red flowers, blossoms big as my face, like blood bubbles nestled in thorns, often resting on the bare rock. No good to stop here. Carnivorous.
I squatted on a broken seat of granite in the yellowing afternoon. A snail the size of my curled forefinger bobbed his eyes at a puddle big as my palm. Half an hour later, climbing down a canyon wall when yellow had died under violet, I saw a tear in the rock: another opening into the source-cave. I decided on nighting it there, and ducked in.
Still smells of humans and death. Which is good. Dangerous animals avoid it. I stalked inside, padding on all fours. Loose earth became moss, became cement underfoot. Outside, night, sonic lace of crickets and whining wasps I would not make on my knife, was well into black development.
Soon I touched a metal track, turned, and followed it with my hands . . . over a place where dirt had fallen, across a scattering of twigs and leaves, then down a long slope. I was about to stop, roll against the cave wall where it was drier, and sleep, when the track split.
I stood up.
When I shrilled on my blade, a long echo came from the right: endless passage there. But only a stubby resonance from the left: some sort of chamber. I walked left. My hip brushed a door jamb.
Then a room glowed suddenly before me. The sensor circuits were still sensitive. Grilled walls, blue glass desk, brass light fixtures, cabinets, and a television screen set in the wall. Squinting in the new light, I walked over. When they still work, the colors are nice to watch: they make patterns and the patterns make music in me. Several people who had gone exploring the source-cave had told me about them (night fire and freakishly interested children knotted around the flame and the adventurer), and I’d gone to see one in a well explored arm two years back. Which is how I learned about the music.
Color television is certainly a lot more fun than this terribly risky genetic method of reproduction we’ve taken over. Ah well. It’s a lovely world.
I sat on the desk and tried knobs till one clicked. The screen grayed at me, flickered, streamed with colors.
There was static, so I found the volume knob and turned it down . . . so I could hear the music in the colors. Just as I raised my blade to my mouth, something happened.
Laughter.
First I thought it was melody. But it was a voice laughing. And on the screen, in chaotic shimmerings, a face. It wasn’t a picture of a face. It was as if I was just looking at the particular dots of melody/hue that formed the face, ignoring the rest. I would have seen those features on any visual riot: Friza’s face.
The voice was someone else’s.
Friza dissolved. Another face replaced hers: Dorik’s. The strange laughter again. Suddenly there was Friza on one side of the screen, and Dorik on the other. Centered: the boy who was laughing at me. The picture cleared, filled, and I lost the rest of the room. Behind him, crumbled streets, beams jutting from the wrecks of walls, weeds writhing; and all lit with flickering green, the sun white on the reticulated sky. On a lamp-post behind him perched a creature with fins and white gills, scraping one red foot on the rust. On the curb was a hydrant laced with light and verdigris.
The boy, a redhead—redder than the Blois, redder than blood-glutted blossoms—laughed with downcast eyes. His lashes were gold. Transparent skin caught up the green and fluoresced with it; but I knew that under normal light he would have been as pale as Whitey dying.
“Lobey,” in the laughter, and his lips uncurtained small teeth—many too many of them. Like the shark’s mouth, maybe, I’d seen in La Dire’s book, rank on rank of ivory needles. “Lobey, how you gonna find me, huh?”
“What . . . ?” and expected the illusion to end with my voice.
But somewhere that naked, laughing boy still stood with one foot in the gutter filled with waving weeds. Only Friza and Dorik were gone.
“Where are you?”
He looked up and his eyes had no whites, only glittering gold and brown. I’d seen a few like that before, eyes. Unnerving, still, to look at a dog’s eyes in a human face. “My mother called me Bonny William. Now they all call me Kid Death.” He sat on the curb, hanging his hands over his knees. “You’re gonna find me, Lobey, kill me like I killed Friza and Dorik?”
“You? You, Lo Bonny William—”
“No Lo. Kid Death. Not Lo Kid.”
“You killed them? But . . . why?” Despair unvoiced my words to whispers.
“Because they were different. And I am more different than any of you. You scare me, and when I’m frightened”—laughing again—“I kill.” He blinked. “You’re not looking for me, you know. I’m looking for you.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook shocked crimson from his white brow. “I’m bringing you down here to me. If I didn’t want you, you’d never find me. Because I do want you, there’s no way you can avoid me. I can see through the eyes of anyone on this world, on any world where our ancestors have ever been: so I know a lot about many things I’ve never touched or smelled. You’ve started out not knowing where I am and running towards me. You’ll end, Lo Lobey”—he raised his head—“fleeing my green home, scrabbling on the sand like a blind goat trying to keep footing at a chimney edge, and—”
“—how do you know about—”
“—you’ll fall and break your
neck.” He shook a finger at me, clawed like Little Jon’s. “Come to me, Lo Lobey.”
“If I find you, will you give me back Friza?”
“I’ve already given you back Le Dorik for a little while.”
”Can you give me back Friza?”
“Everything I kill I keep. In my own private kage.” His moist laughter. Water in a cold pipe, I think.
“Kid Death?”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
The sound snagged on ivory needles.
“Where are you from, Kid Death? Where are you going?”
The long fingers raveled like linen rope snaring gold coins. He pushed weeds away from the gutter grill with his foot. “I broiled away childhood in the sands of an equatorial desert kage with no keeper to love me. Like you, lively in your jungle, I was haunted by the memories of those who homed under this sun before our parents’ parents came, took on these bodies, loves, and fears. Most of those around me in the kage died of thirst. At first I saved some of my fellows, bringing water to them the way Friza threw the stone—oh yes, I saw that too. I did that for a while. Then for a while I killed whoever was put in the kage with me, and took the water directly from their bodies. I would go to the fence and stare across the dunes to the palms at the oasis where our tribe worked. I never thought to leave the kage, back then, because like mirages on the glistering I saw through all the worlds’ eyes—I saw what you and Friza and Dorik saw, as I see what goes all over this arm of the galaxy. When what I saw frightened me, I closed the eyes seeing. That’s what happened to Friza and Dorik. When I am still curious about what’s going on through those eyes, more curious than frightened, I open them again. That’s what happened with Dorik.”
“You’re strong,” I said.
“That’s where I come from, the desert, where death shifts in the gritty bones of the Earth. And now? I am going further and further into the sea.” Raising his eyes now, his red hair floated back in the shivering green.
“Kid Death,” I called again; he was much further away. “Why were you in the kage? You look more functional than half the Lo and La of my village.”
Kid Death turned his head and looked at me from the corner of his eyes. He mocked. “Functional? To be born on a desert, a white-skinned redhead with gills?”
The spreading, drinking, miniature mouth of the shark washed away. I blinked. I couldn’t think of anything else so I took papers out of the filing cabinet, spread them under the desk, and lay down, tired and bewildered.
I remember I picked up one page and spelled my way through a paragraph. La Dire had taught me enough to read record labels, when for a while I had foraged about the village archives:
Evacuate upper levels with all due haste. Alarm system will indicate radiation at standard levels. Deeper detection devices are located . . .
Most of the words were beyond me. I halved the paper with toes and quartered it with fingers, let the pieces fall on my stomach before I picked up my machete to play myself to sleep.
What, then, is noble abstraction? It is taking first the essential elements of the thing to be represented, then the rest in the order of importance (so that wherever we pause we shall always have obtained more than we leave behind) and using any expedient to impress what we want upon the mind without caring about the mere literal accuracy of such expedient.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
A poem is a machine for making choices.
John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean
Hours after—I figure it could have been two, it could have been twelve—I rolled from under the desk and came up grunting, yawning, scratching. When I stepped into the hall the light faded.
I didn’t go back the way I’d come but headed forward again. There are lots of breakthroughs into the upper levels. I’d go till I saw morning and climb out. About half an hour later I see a three-foot stretch of it (morning) in the ceiling, behind black leaves, and leap for it. Good jumping power in those hams.
I scrambled out on crumbling ground and tame brambles, tripped on a vine, but all in all did pretty well. Which is to avoid saying “on the whole.” Outside was cool, misty. Fifty yards by, the lapping edge of a lake flashed. I walked through the tangle to the clear beach. Chunked rock became gravel, became sand. It was a big lake. Down one arm of the beach things faded into reeds and swamp and things. Across, there was a gorse covered plain. I had no idea where I was. But I didn’t want to be in a swamp, so I walked up the other way.
Thrash, thrash, snap!
I stopped.
Thrash! Just inside the jungle something churned and fought. The fighting was at the point where one opponent was near exhausted: activity came in momentary spurts. (Hissssss!) Curiosity, hunger, devilment sent me forward with high machete. I crept up a slope of rock, looked over into a glade.
Attacked by flowers, a dragon was dying. Blossoms jeweled his scales; thorns tangled his legs. As I watched, he tried again to tear them off with his teeth, but they scurried back, raking briars across his hide, or whipping them at his runny, yellow eyes.
The lizard (twice as big as Easy and man-branded on his left hinder haunch with a crusty cross) was trying to protect the external gill/lung arrangement that fluttered along his neck. The plants had nearly immobilized him, but when a bloom advanced to tear away his breath, he scraped and flailed with one free claw. He’d mauled a good many of the blossoms and their petals scattered the torn earth.
The cross told me he wouldn’t hurt me (even crazed, the lizard once used to man becomes pathetic, seldom harmful) so I jumped down from the rock.
A blossom creeping to attack emptied an air-bladder inches from my foot, “Sssssss . . . . .” in surprise.
I hacked it, and nervous ooze (nervous in the sense that its nerves are composed of the stuff) belched greenly to the ground. Thorns flailed my legs. But I told you about the skin down there. I just have to watch out for my belly and the palms of my hands; feet are fine. With my foot I seized a creeper from the lizard’s shoulder and pulled it out far enough—stained teeth go clik-clik-clik popping from the dragon’s skin where they had been gnawing—to get my blade under, twist . . . and . . . rip!
Nerve dribbled the dragon’s hide.
Those flowers communicate somehow (differently perhaps) and strove for me, one suddenly rising on its tendrils and leaping, “Sssssss . . .” I twiddled my blade in its brain.
I shouted encouragement to the dragon, threw a brave grin. He moaned reptilianly. Lo Hawk should see me do proud his skill.
His mane brushed my arm, his teeth crunched a flower while tendrils curled from the corners of his mouth. He chewed a while, decided he didn’t like it, spat thorns. I pried off two more: his foot came free.
“Sssssss . . .” I looked to the right.
Which was a mistake because it was coming from the left.
Mistakes like that are a drag. Long and prickly wrapped my ankle and tried to jerk me off my feet. Fortunately you just can’t do that. So then it sank lots of teeth into my calf and commenced chewing. I whirled and snatched white petals (this one an albino) which came away gently in my hand. Crunch, Crunch, still on my calf. My sword hand was up. I brought it down but it got caught in a net of brambles. Something scratched the back of my neck. Which ain’t so tough.
Neither is (come to think): the small of my back, under my chin, between my legs, armpits, behind my ears—I was quickly cataloging all the tender places now. Damn flowers move just slow enough to give you time to think.
Then something long and hot sang by my shins. Petals snapped into the air. The plant stopped chewing and burped nervously down my ankle.
Pinnnnng near my hand, and my hand pulled free. I staggered, hacked another briar away. A bloated rose slithered down the dragon’s leg and crawled for cover. They communicate, yes, and the communication was fear and retreat. The music, though! Lord, the music!
I whirled to look up on the rock.
Morning had got far enough along to
rouge the sky behind him. He flicked a final encumbering flower from the beast, “Sssssss . . . blop!” and coiled his whip. I rubbed my calf. The dragon moaned, off key.
“Yours?” I thumbed over my shoulder at the beast.
“Was.” He breathed deeply and the flat, bony chest sagged with his breathing, the ribs opening and closing like blinds. “If you come with us, he’s yours—to ride, anyway. If you don’t, he’s mine again.”
The dragon rubbed his gills ingenuously against my hip.
“Can you handle a dragon whip?” the stranger asked me.
I shrugged. “The only time I ever even saw one of those before was when some herders got off their trail six years ago.” We’d all climbed up Beryl Face and watched them drive the herd of lizards back through Green-glass Pass. When Lo Hawk went to talk to them, I went with him, which is where I found out about branding and the gentle monsters.
The stranger grinned. “Well, it’s gone and happened again. I judge we’re about twenty-five kilometers off. You want a job and a lizard to ride?”
I looked at the broken flowers. “Yeah.”
“Well, there’s your mount, and your job is to get him up here and back with the herd, first.”
“Oh.” (Now, lemme see; I remember the herders perched behind the lumps of the beasts’ shoulders with their feet sort of tucked into the scaly armpits. My feet? And holding on to the two white whisker type things that grew back from the gills: Gee . . . Haw? Giddiap!)
We floundered in the mud about fifteen minutes with instructions shouted down, and I learned cuss words I hadn’t ever heard from that guy. Towards the end we were both sort of laughing. The dragon was up and on the beach now, and he had quite unintentionally thrown me into the water—again.
“Hey, you think I’m really going to learn how to ride that thing?”
With one hand he was helping me up, with the other he was holding my mount by the whiskers, with another he was recoiling his whip, and with the fourth he just scratched his woolly head. “Don’t give up. I didn’t do too much better when I started. Up you go.”