Guardian

  I didn’t burst into tears or scream or rend my garments. I sat there in the sputtering light and read the note again, sure that it must be some cruel trick or stupid joke. I had sure knowledge that Chuck could not write much beyond signing his name. But then I turned over the paper and found a note in the same hand:

  “Writ this 14th day of December year of our Lord 1898 by Morris Chambers, for the hand of Chuck Coleman, his mark here. And there was Chuck’s scrawl with this note appended beneath: I was not there at the time but hear tell that your son was very brave. My gravest condolences in your loss. M.C.

  Then I was blinded by tears and collapsed, striking my head on the pine floor, and then striking it again and again, hard bright sparks in my eyes. I rolled on the floor weeping, and lost my water, beyond care.

  I remembered the moment in Skagway when he handed me the Pinkerton man’s revolver, agreeing with some reluctance that he should never need it.

  I needed it now.

  I staggered to the dresser by the bed and jerked open the top drawer. There it was in a corner, wrapped in blue muslin. I unwrapped it, sudden oil smell, and verified that it was loaded, and raised it to my temple. Then I thought about the horrible sight that would leave, and lowered the muzzle to where I thought my heart was, beneath my left breast, and a large raven came through the door.

  The door didn’t open. He walked through it as if it were made of air. “Rosa,” he said in a clear voice, “you can’t do that. Your God would not approve.”

  He stalked across the floor in that determined way that ravens have. “One Corinthians, chapter six: ‘know thee not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you … and ye are not your own?”

  With a clatter of feathers, he hopped up onto the dresser. “Chapter twenty of Exodus. Verse thirteen. You must know that one.”

  “What are you?”

  “A raven, dummy. Exodus 20:13. Give it to me.”

  “You’re the one who kept telling me ‘no gold’?”

  “Yes. Exodus 20:13?”

  “‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

  “Let’s get that straight. It doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt not kill anybody but yourself.’”

  I turned the gun on it. “It does tell us that the Devil quotes scripture.”

  “Luke. And you’re gonna kill the Devil with an eggbeater.”

  The gun was suddenly light in my hand. I looked down and it was an eggbeater. I dropped it and it hit the floor with a loud thump, and formed back into a revolver.

  “Not that I’m actually the Devil. I’m not actually even a raven.” It hopped to the floor, impossibly slow, and for an instant turned into old Gordon. He had his huge nest of hair let down, all the way to his knees, and was wearing nothing else. He turned back into the raven.

  “You’re Gordon?”

  “No and yes. You know what the Tlingit raven is.”

  “A shape-changer. But—”

  “And a creature who can talk to all animals, including humans. Leave it at that, for the time being.”

  I picked up the letter and turned it over, to the terrible message. “You have something to do with this?”

  “I didn’t cause it. I’m here because of it, of course.”

  “To save me … from myself?”

  “I haven’t saved you yet.”

  I groped for the chair behind me, and sat down. I couldn’t speak; couldn’t even think. “What do you really look like, if you aren’t a bird or Gordon?”

  It flickered, like a candle flame, but didn’t change.

  “In a sense, the question is meaningless; I take whatever form is appropriate. I do have a shape for resting, but I think it would disturb you.”

  “Demonic?”

  “No. Forget demons and gods. It’s as plain and natural as changing clothes. Stand up.”

  I did, and suddenly the room around me changed. I could-see three walls at once, in sharp detail even though the light was low and flickering. My eyes were only about three feet off the ground. Effortlessly, I turned my head completely around, and saw on the wall behind me the shadow of a large bird.

  “What?” I said, and it came out both a word and a squawk.

  “You’re a bald eagle,” it said. “Come over to the mirror.”

  Walking was strange, bobbing talons scraping along the wood. In the full-length mirror by the wardrobe, the image of a magnificent eagle, cocking its head when I cocked mine; raising and lowering its feet. I raised my arm and spread my fingers; it raised a wing and the end feathers spread out. My mind and body knew exactly how that would change my course of flight, scooping air to slow and drop.

  It was a strange mental state, simple and beautiful. I tried to say something about that, but all that came out was another squawk: “I am!”

  “You certainly are.” The eagle in the mirror stretched impossibly tall and with a little “pop,” turned back into me, nude. I covered myself reflexively, as if a crow or demon would care, and clothes appeared on my flesh.

  Nothing like normal clothing, though. I looked at my strange image in the mirror: it looked as if I had been dipped in wax, a garment like a second skin, covering everything but my head, hands, and feet. Slippers appeared on my feet.

  “That will keep you warm. Follow me.” He walked through the door, again without opening it.

  “But …” I blew out the lights and pushed open the door. It had stopped snowing, and the raven was standing there in the moonlight.

  It was bitter cold, but the suit of clothes warmed up automatically. It also warmed my face and hands somehow. I touched my face and it felt slippery.

  “This way.” It hopped and fluttered down the path at the rate of a fast walk. We went away from town, up the hill toward Mount Verstovaia.

  I followed him without question, numb and confused. We walked down a game trail for a few hundred yards—I was starting to worry about bears—and then picked our way through undergrowth for a few minutes.

  The raven said something in a language neither bird nor human, and a door opened in the middle of the air. I stepped sideways and saw that there was nothing behind it. The door was a rectangle of soft golden light that led into a room that was manifestly not there. But the raven walked in, and I cautiously followed him.

  The floor of the room was soft, the air warm with a trace of something like cinnamon. As if someone had been baking rolls.

  The door closed and the raven disappeared. I think I did, too. At least I had no sense of being in any one place—all of the room seemed equally close. Perhaps I became the room, in some sense.

  “I want to go a few places,” the raven said in my mind, “and show you a few things. You’ve read Gulliver’s Travels.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Wasn’t a question. This is not that. But there may be some aspects of if you will find amusing, or educational.”

  A rush of anxiety finally caught up with me. “I don’t want to go anyplace. I want to go home, and sort things out.”

  “You’ll get home. Right now I want to put some distance between you and that revolver.”

  “That was a rash impulse. I won’t do it.” As I said that, I wondered whether it was a lie.

  “You’ll be home in less than no time. Close your eyes until I tell you to open them.”

  I obeyed for a couple of minutes, though it was extremely uncomfortable—as if I were being rotated slowly about one axis, like a leisurely figure skater, and revolved about a different one, cartwheeling.

  I opened my eyes for one blink and regretted it. Colors I couldn’t put a name to, and unearthly shapes that seemed to pass through my body. I started to vomit and choked it back.

  “Don’t look!” the bird shrieked, and I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, the acid taste burning my throat and soft palate, anxiety rising. “Only a few minutes more. Calm down.”

  Maybe this was hell, I thought. Maybe I did pull the trigger, and this was my punishment—not imps and flames, but an eternity of confusi
on and nausea.

  It was shorter than eternity, though. Eventually the sensation subsided, and the bird told me to open my eyes.

  Once more I had the sense of “being” the room, and then the raven materialized, and so did I. I sat down on the soft floor, exhausted.’

  “You’ve read Mars as the Abode of Life,” it said, “by Percival Lowell.”

  “You know everything I read?”

  “That, and more. You also read your namesake’s book, of course.”

  “Have we … have you gone all the way to Mars?”

  “No. Lowell was wrong. Mars never had anything more interesting than moss. But there are living creatures elsewhere.”

  “Venus?”

  “You know what a Bessemer converter is.”

  I remembered the flame- and smoke-belching refineries of Pittsburgh. “Venus is like that?”

  “Worse. No place in your solar system, other than Earth, has life that’s at all interesting. There’s some wildlife on satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, but they’re less intelligent than a congressman, as Mark Twain would say. Dumber than a snail, actually.

  “We’ve gone farther than that. Ten million times farther.” The door opened and a soft reddish glow came in, like the end of sunset.

  I stepped to the door. The sun was not setting; it was two hand spans above the horizon. There was enough mist or smoke in the air that I could look at it directly. It was much larger than our sun, and it looked like a piece of coal in a cooling stove, bright red with crusts of black.

  Perhaps I had gone to hell. The landscape was Dantean, treeless chalk cliffs with precipitous overhangs. We stepped outside and were on such an over-hang ourselves, facing a drop of a hundred yards down to a brown trickle of water. The air was hot and chalky, like a schoolroom in summer, after the boards are cleaned.

  There was vegetation on our side of the gorge, weeds and gnarled bushes that were purple rather than green. They all stuck out of the cliff at the same angle, pointing toward the sun.

  “The sun never moves,” the raven said. “This planet always keeps one face to it, as often happens, given enough time.”

  “Like the moon, or Mercury,” I said.

  “Half right,” he said. “They’re wrong about Mercury.”

  He suddenly became old Gordon, and took my hand in his. “We’re going to fly now. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Fly?” Something pressed up under my feet and we rose, slowly at first, and floated out over the precipice. That set my heart to hammering, and I squeezed his hand so hard his knuckles cracked.

  “There’s no way you could drop. Relax and enjoy the view.” We stopped rising and moved forward, faster and faster, with no wind or sense of acceleration.

  (Gordon was still wearing only his hair, which came down far enough in back for a semblance of modesty. But only in back.)

  On the other side of the canyon, the vegetation was sparse and regularly spaced, not in cultivated rows as such, but rather in that each commanded a certain area of ground, larger for the larger clumps and plants. Some seemed to be the size of trees, though it was hard to estimate, not really knowing how high we were. I studied the plants fiercely; it helped me fight the anxiety of flying.

  “I wanted to stop here first partly because it so resembles your Christian concept of hell. But it’s heaven to the people who live here.”

  “People?”

  “Or ‘creatures.’ In Tlingit there’s a word that encompasses both. There!”

  We descended toward what looked like a patch of a different kind of vegetation, a clump of large transparent tubes. Unlike the other plants, though, they were mobile, twining slowly around each other. They looked like something that belonged in the sea, caressed by slow currents.

  As we touched ground, he changed back into his avian manifestation. “They know me as Raven,” he said, and I heard the capitalization. He fluttered down to the base of the seven tubes. “Take off your shoes.”

  I did, and the ground was surprisingly pleasant, warm and spongy. I worked my toes into it, though, and was rewarded by a sharp pinch.

  “Don’t do that. This is their brain you’re standing on—the part they all share, anyhow. Stand still and they’ll talk to you through your feet.”

  That’s exactly what they did, and it was amazing. It felt as if they’d asked me a thousand questions over the course of a minute, and my brain responded directly, without translating the answers into speech.

  They talked back, in a sense. It wasn’t language so much as feeling. There was sympathy for my loss—six of them were children of the central one—but an admonition to hold on to life, although what they actually meant was both more specific and harder to express. The point of life was, to them, posing problems and solving them, and passing on the solutions.

  “These people were old before life appeared on your Earth,” Raven said. “This particular seven has been alive for more than a million years.”

  “Are they immortal? They’ll live forever?”

  “No. They’ll live another million or ten million years. When they agree to die, they produce a spore, which will grow into another family on this spot.”

  “Another seven?”

  “Or eleven, sometimes, or thirteen. One of them volunteers to stay alive for a while and act as parent, as teacher.

  “It’s not suicide, since their essence is preserved in the parent, as is the essence of the thousand generations that went before.”

  How ugly and alien they might seem if I hadn’t been literally in touch with them. Worms wriggling around, sticky secretions. But they were in a state of perfect love, angels living in hell. “Why do they have to die?”

  “They die when they’ve learned all they can. You know of Mendel’s genetics experiments.”

  “Yes.” Again, it hadn’t been a question.

  “They need to replace themselves with a genetically different family. A group that can look at all the accumulated knowledge from a different point of view.”

  “That’s all they do?” I said. “They don’t have to worry about food, water, shelter?”

  “Angels don’t strive. They absorb radiant energy through the plants around them. They have a thing like a taproot that extends below the water table. As for shelter, there’s no weather on this part of the planet—though it’s fierce around the circumference where dark meets light, a never-ending storm.”

  “But if they don’t go anyplace or do anything, how can they find new things to think about?”

  “It comes to them through people like you and me. They’ve never met anyone from Earth before, so you gave them lots of new experiences and feelings to consider.”

  “You said they know you. You’re from Earth.”

  “Not actually. I’m a kind of a visitor. A ‘guardian’ is the closest human word.”

  “My guardian?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” He hopped around to face the angels. “People like me are especially interesting to them, because we travel around. They want to know where they themselves came from, and how and why they wound up here.”

  “Couldn’t it be like Darwin contends? If they evolved from simpler forms, they wouldn’t remember that far back, any more than we remember being infants.”

  “Very good, Rosa, but that’s the point: on this whole planet there’s nothing more complicated than a bush. Nothing for them to have evolved from.

  “Furthermore, on almost every planet there’s a particular kind of molecule that every living thing has. That’s true of every other species here, but not of them: they have a different molecule.”

  “So they originally came from another planet?”

  “That’s the simplest explanation. But their curiosity is not just a matter of genealogy—they wonder whether they were put here for some purpose, and what it might be.”

  I smiled. “That sounds familiar.”

  He let out an annoyed squawk, and continued in Gordon’s voice. “I’m not trafficking in relig
ion here. These people don’t even know whether they’re natural, or some sort of artificially contrived biological machine, hidden in this out-of-the-way place to grind away at information for millions of millennia, ultimately to solve some problem that now is still beyond their ken.

  “And if they are machines to that purpose, will they be switched off once they solve the problem?”

  They began singing then. There was no other noise in this still place, except when Raven or I talked, but at first I didn’t realize it was coming from them. It was a sweet pure sound, like a glass harmonica, complex chords that became words in English:

  Before you go back to Earth

  Before you go home

  Come here to share what you’ve learned

  Come here to learn what we’ve thought about you.

  “That’s unusual,” Raven said. “I didn’t know they could do that.”

  “Can I, may I tell them ‘yes’?”

  “Do.”

  I told them that I would be glad to help them in their quest, and their response was a jolt of pure sensual pleasure that started in the center of me and radiated out. I curled my toes into their brain and got the warning pinch again.

  I didn’t have a word for it then, orgasm, but I knew the feeling from Doc’s tender ministrations. So the most powerful orgasm I’d ever had came through the soles of my feet, through the brain of seven man-sized worms. It was stranger than strange, but it did give me incentive to return.

  “They know the workings of your body better than any human physicians could. I suspect they’ve fixed things here and there.”

  “They have.” I moved my arm in a circle, and the shoulder pain was gone. So was the pain in my finger joints. “But I’m the first human being they’ve met! Human from Earth, I mean.”

  “They’ve seen a million varieties of both life and pain.”

  Including the pain of loss. I still grieved as strongly for Daniel, but it didn’t make me want to stop living. I would live for both of us now.