But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would become shapely and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small girl whose hair was a violet-blue flame.
She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he’d found a friend, a love, a wife, one who would a week from now lie with him atop the funeral pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.
Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.
“Your name?” he shouted after her.
“Lyte!” she called laughingly back.
“I’m Sim,” he answered, confused and bewildered.
“Sim!” she repeated it, flashing on. “I’ll remember!”
Dark nudged his ribs. “Here, eat,” she said to the distracted boy. “Eat or you’ll never get big enough to catch her.”
From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. “Lyte!” he mocked, dancing malevolently along and away. “Lyte! I’ll remember Lyte, too!”
Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of hair, sadly. “I see your life before you, little Sim. You’ll need weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry—the sun’s coming!”
They ran back to the caves.
V
One-fourth of his life was over! Babyhood was gone. He was now a young boy! Wild rains lashed the valley at nightfall. He watched new river channels cut in the valley, out past the mountain of the metal seed. He stored the knowledge for later use. Each night there was a new river, a bed newly cut.
“What’s beyond the valley?” wondered Sim.
“No one’s ever been beyond it,” explained Dark. “All who tried to reach the plain were frozen to death or burnt. The only land we know’s within half an hour’s run. Half an hour out and half an hour back.”
“No one has ever reached the metal seed, then?”
Dark scoffed. “The Scientists, they try. Silly fools. They don’t know enough to stop. It’s no use. It’s too far.”
The Scientists. The word stirred him. He had almost forgotten the vision he had in the moments before and after birth. His voice was eager. “Where are the Scientists?”
Dark looked away from him, “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. They’d kill you, experimenting! I don’t want you joining them! Live your life, don’t cut it in half trying to reach that silly metal thing on the mountain.”
“I’ll find out where they are from someone else, then!”
“No one’ll tell you! They hate the Scientists. You’ll have to find them on your own. And then what? Will you save us? Yes, save us little boy!” Her face was sullen; already half her life was gone.
“We can’t just sit and talk and eat,” he protested. “And nothing else.” He leapt up.
“Go find them!” she retorted acidly. “They’ll help you forget. Yes, yes,” she spat it out. “Forget your life’s over in just a few more days!”
Sim ran through the tunnels, seeking. Sometimes he half imagined where the Scientists were. But then a flood of angry thought from those around him, when he asked the direction to the Scientists’ cave, washed over him in confusion and resentment. After all, it was the Scientists’ fault that they had been placed upon this terrible world! Sim flinched under the bombardment of oaths and curses.
Quietly he took his seat in a central chamber with the children to listen to the grown men talk. This was the time of education, the Time of Talking. No matter how he chafed at delay, or how great his impatience, even though life slipped fast from him and death approached like a black meteor, he knew his mind needed knowledge. Tonight, then, was the night of school. But he sat uneasily. Only five more days of life.
Chion sat across from Sim, his thin-mouthed face arrogant.
Lyte appeared between the two. The last few hours had made her firmer footed, gentler, taller. Her hair shone brighter. She smiled as she sat beside Sim, ignoring Chion. And Chion became rigid at this and ceased eating.
The dialogue crackled, filled the room. Swift as heartbeats, one thousand, two thousand words a minute. Sim learned, his head filled. He did not shut his eyes, but lapsed into a kind of dreaming that was almost intraembryonic in lassitude and drowsy vividness. In the faint background the words were spoken, and they wove a tapestry of knowledge in his head.
He dreamed of green meadows free of stones, all grass, round and rolling and rushing easily toward a dawn with no taint of freezing, merciless cold or smell of boiled rock or scorched monument. He walked across the green meadow. Overhead the metal seeds flew by in a heaven that was a steady, even temperature. Things were slow, slow, slow.
Birds lingered upon gigantic trees that took a hundred, two hundred, five thousand days to grow. Everything remained in its place, the birds did not flicker nervously at a hint of sun, nor did the trees suck back frightenedly when a ray of sunlight poured over them.
In this dream people strolled, they rarely ran, the heart rhythm of them was evenly languid, not jerking and insane. The grass remained, and did not burn away in torches. The dream people talked always of tomorrow and living and not tomorrow and dying. It all seemed so familiar that when Sim felt someone take his hand he thought it simply another part of the dream.
Lyte’s hand lay inside his own. “Dreaming?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Things are balanced. Our minds, to even things, to balance the unfairness of our living, go back in on ourselves, to find what there is that is good to see.”
He beat his hand against the stone floor again and again. “It does not make things fair! I hate it! It reminds me that there is something better, something I have missed! Why can’t we be ignorant! Why can’t we live and die without knowing that this is an abnormal living?” And his breath rushed harshly from his half-open, constricted mouth.
“There is purpose in everything,” said Lyte. “This gives us purpose, makes us work, plan, try to find a way.”
His eyes were hot emeralds in his face. “I walked up a hill of grass, very slowly,” he said.
“The same hill of grass I walked an hour ago?” asked Lyte.
“Perhaps. Close enough to it. The dream is better than the reality.” He flexed his eyes, narrowed them. “I watched people and they did not eat.”
“Or talk?”
“Or talk, either. And we always are eating, always talking. Sometimes those people in the dream sprawled with their eyes shut, not moving a muscle.”
As Lyte stared down into his face a terrible thing happened. He imagined her face blackening, wrinkling, twisting into knots of agedness. The hair blew out like snow about her ears, the eyes were like discolored coins caught in a web of lashes. Her teeth sank away from her lips, the delicate fingers hung like charred twigs from her atrophied wrists. Her beauty was consumed and wasted even as he watched, and when he seized her, in terror, he cried out, for he imagined his own hand corroded, and he choked back a cry.
“Sim, what’s wrong?”
The saliva in his mouth dried at the taste of the words.
“Five more days … ”
“The Scientists.”
Sim started. Who’d spoken? In the dim light a tall man talked. “The Scientists crashed us on this world, and now have wasted thousands of lives and time. It’s no use. It’s no use. Tolerate them but give them none of your time. You only live once, remember.”
Where were these hated Scientists? Now, after the Learning, the Time of Talking, he was ready to find them. Now, at least, he knew enough to begin his fight for freedom, for the ship!
“Sim, where’re you going?”
But Sim was gone. The echo of his running feet died away down a shaft of polished stone.
It seemed that half the night was wasted. He blundered into a dozen dead ends. Many times he was attacked by the insane young men who wanted his life energy. Their superstitious ravings echoed after him. The gashes of their hungry fingern
ails covered his body.
He found what he looked for.
A half dozen men gathered in a small basalt cave deep down in the cliff lode. On a table before them lay objects which, though unfamiliar, struck harmonious chords in Sim.
The Scientists worked in sets, old men doing important work, young men learning, asking questions; and at their feet were three small children. They were a process. Every eight days there was an entirely new set of scientists working on any one problem. The amount of work done was terribly inadequate. They grew old, fell dead just when they were beginning their creative period. The creative time of any one individual was perhaps a matter of twelve hours out of his entire span. Three quarters of one’s life was spent learning, a brief interval of creative power, then senility, insanity, death.
The men turned as Sim entered.
“Don’t tell me we have a recruit?” said the eldest of them.
“I don’t believe it,” said another, younger one. “Chase him away. He’s probably one of those warmongers.”
“No, no,” objected the elder one, moving with little shuffles of his bare feet toward Sim. “Come in, come in, boy.” He had friendly eyes, slow eyes, unlike those of the swift inhabitants of the upper caves. Gray and quiet. “What do you want?”
Sim hesitated, lowered his head, unable to meet the quiet, gentle gaze. “I want to live,” he whispered.
The old man laughed quietly. He touched Sim’s shoulder. “Are you a new breed? Are you sick?” he queried of Sim, half seriously. “Why aren’t you playing? Why aren’t you readying yourself for the time of love and marriage and children? Don’t you know that tomorrow night you’ll be almost grown? Don’t you realize that if you are not careful you’ll miss all of life?” He stopped.
Sim moved his eyes back and forth with each query. He blinked at the instruments on the table top. “Shouldn’t I be here?” he asked.
“Certainly,” roared the old man, sternly. “But it’s a miracle you are. We’ve had no volunteers from the rank and file for a thousand days! We’ve had to breed our own scientists, a closed unit! Count us! Six! Six men! And three children! Are we not overwhelming?” The old man spat upon the stone floor. “We ask for volunteers and the people shout back at us, ‘Get someone else!’ or ‘We have no time!’ And you know why they say that?”
“No.” Sim flinched.
“Because they’re selfish. They’d like to live longer, yes, but they know that anything they do cannot possibly insure their own lives any extra time. It might guarantee longer life to some future offspring of theirs. But they won’t give up their love, their brief youth, give up one interval of sunset or sunrise!”
Sim leaned against the table, earnestly. “I understand.”
“You do?” The old man stared at him blindly. He sighed and slapped the child’s arm gently. “Yes, of course, you do. It’s too much to expect anyone to understand, anymore. You’re rare.”
The others moved in around Sim and the old man.
“I am Dienc. Tomorrow night Cort here will be in my place. I’ll be dead by then. And the night after that someone else will be in Cort’s place, and then you, if you work and believe—but first, I give you a chance. Return to your playmates if you want. There is someone you love? Return to her. Life is short. Why should you care for the unborn to come? You have a right to youth. Go now, if you want. Because if you stay you’ll have no time for anything but working and growing old and dying at your work. But it is good work. Well?”
Sim looked at the tunnel. From a distance the wind roared and blew, the smells of cooking and the patter of naked feet sounded, and the laughter of young people was an increasingly good thing to hear. He shook his head, impatiently, and his eyes were wet.
“I will stay,” he said.
VI
The third night and third day passed. It was the fourth night. Sim was drawn into their living. He learned about that metal seed upon the top of the far mountain. He heard of the original seeds—things called “ships” that crashed and how the survivors hid and dug in the cliffs, grew old swiftly and in their scrabbling to barely survive, forgot all science. Knowledge of mechanical things had no chance of survival in such a volcanic civilization. There was only NOW for each human.
Yesterday didn’t matter, tomorrow stared them vividly in their faces. But somehow the radiations that had forced their aging had also induced a kind of telepathic communication whereby philosophies and impressions were absorbed by the newborn. Racial memory, growing instinctively, preserved memories of another time.
“Why don’t we go to that ship on the mountain?” asked Sim.
“It is too far. We would need protection from the sun,” explained Dienc.
“Have you tried to make protection?”
“Salves and ointments, suits of stone and bird-wing and, recently, crude metals. None of which worked. In ten thousand more lifetimes perhaps we’ll have made a metal in which will flow cool water to protect us on the march to the ship. But we work so slowly, so blindly. This morning, mature, I took up my instruments. Tomorrow, dying, I lay them down. What can one man do in one day? If we had ten thousand men, the problem would be solved.... ”
“I will go to the ship,” said Sim.
“Then you will die,” said the old man. A silence had fallen on the room at Sim’s words. Then the men stared at Sim. “You are a very selfish boy.”
“Selfish!” cried Sim, resentfully.
The old man patted the air. “Selfish in a way I like. You want to live longer, you’ll do anything for that. You will try for the ship. But I tell you it is useless. Yet, if you want to, I cannot stop you. At least you will not be like those among us who go to war for an extra few days of life.”
“War?” asked Sim. “How can there be war here?”
And a shudder ran through him. He did not understand.
“Tomorrow will be time enough for that,” said Dienc. “Listen to me, now.”
The night passed.
VII
It was morning. Lyte came shouting and sobbing down a corridor, and ran full into his arms. She had changed again. She was older, again, more beautiful. She was shaking and she held to him. “Sim, they’re coming after you!”
Bare feet marched down the corridor, surged inward at the opening. Chion stood grinning there, taller, too, a sharp rock in either of his hands. “Oh, there you are, Sim!”
“Go away!” cried Lyte, savagely whirling on him.
“Not until we take Sim with us,” Chion assured her. Then, smiling at Sim. “If that is, he is with us in the fight.”
Dienc shuffled forward, his eye weakly fluttering, his birdlike hands fumbling in the air. “Leave!” he shrilled angrily. “This boy is a Scientist now. He works with us.”
Chion ceased smiling. “There is better work to be done. We go now to fight the people in the farthest cliffs.” His eyes glittered anxiously. “Of course, you will come with us, Sim?”
“No, no!” Lyte clutched at his arm.
Sim patted her shoulder, then turned to Chion. “Why are you attacking these people?”
“There are three extra days for those who go with us to fight.”
“Three extra days! Of living?”
Chion nodded firmly. “If we win, we live eleven days instead of eight. The cliffs they live in, something about the mineral in it that protects you from radiation! Think of it, Sim, three long, good days of life. Will you join us?”
Dienc interrupted. “Get along without him. Sim is my pupil!”
Chion snorted. “Go die, old man. By sunset tonight you’ll be charred bone. Who are you to order us? We are young, we want to live longer.”
Eleven days. The words were unbelievable to Sim. Eleven days. Now he understood why there was war. Who wouldn’t fight to have his life lengthened by almost half its total. So many more days of living! Yes. Why not, indeed!
“Three extra days,” called Dienc, stridently, “if you live to enjoy them. If you’re not killed in battle. I
f If! You have never won yet. You have always lost!”
“But this time,” Chion declared sharply, “we’ll win!”
Sim was bewildered. “But we are all of the same ancestors. Why don’t we all share the best cliffs?”
Chin laughed and adjusted a sharp stone in his hand. ‘Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man’s attitude when he has power. The cliffs there, besides, are smaller, there’s room for only three hundred people in them.”
Three extra days.
“I’ll go with you,” Sim said to Chion.”
“Fine!” Chion was very glad, much too glad at the decision.
Dienc gasped.
Sim turned to Dienc and Lyte. “If I fight, and win, I will be half a mile closer to the Ship. And I’ll have three extra days in which to strive to reach the Ship. That seems the only thing for me to do.”
Dienc nodded, sadly. “It is the only thing. I believe you. Go along now.”
“Good-bye,” said Sim.
The old man looked surprised, then he laughed as at a little joke on himself. “That’s right—I won’t see you again, will I? Good-bye, then.” And they shook hands.
They went out, Chion, Sim, and Lyte, together, followed by the others, all children growing swiftly into fighting men. And the light in Chion’s eyes was not a good thing to see.
Lyte went with him. She chose his rocks for him and carried them. She would not go back, no matter how he pleaded. The sun was just beyond the horizon and they marched across the valley.