Son of Man by Robert Silverberg
“Books.”
“Really?”
“And things. Ancient things made by other races of mankind.”
He is aroused. Serifice is almost thrust into unimportance. He looks sharply at Ti and says, “Where? How far?”
“Come. Come!”
Ti runs. Clay follows. They trot past the other four Skimmers, who are sprawled decoratively on the ground, eyes closed, limbs drooping relaxedly. As he jogs along, Ti takes little leaps on an invisible trampoline, cutting off arcs of the jaunt with sharp vertical bounds. Ti comes down female from one of these leaps. She is fractionally more voluptuous than the others, with wider hips and distinctly human-looking buttocks; but of course the whole texture of her body remains bizarre and alien to him. He imagines that he can see Ti’s bones like soft white bristles passing through her flesh, carrying sensations and colors rather than serving any structural purpose. They come to a place of scrubby yellow trees growing on a subtle slope; the land just ahead rises as though tipped up by a firm hand from beneath, and gray streaks of talus come screeing down the side like strands of the giant’s hair. The sun is low now and shadows have deep edges. The sky is a trembling red. Midway up the slope, to the accompaniment of unseen trombones, snuffling bassoons, and oily saxophones, Ti begins making flickering gestures with her outspread hands, and an opening appears just ahead of them. He beholds the mouth of a circular passageway, twice his height in diameter, that leads far into the earth. Ti dances forward. He goes after.
The walls of the passageway are crystalline and glow with an inner luminosity that bathes his face and Ti’s with cool green brilliance. The tunnel curves and curves again, bringing them finally to a low-roofed banjo-shaped room in which the echoes of their barefoot footsteps thump and swirl like ponderous motes of dust. Clay sees shelves, cabinets, containers, drawers, and closets. Frozen with wonder, he dares not go forward. Ti opens a glass-faced cabinet and withdraws a sparkling ruby cube the size of her head. He takes it carefully from her, surprised at its lightness.
The cube speaks to him in an unintelligible language. The cadence is strange: a liquid rhythm, rich with anapests, made more powerful by unexpected caesuras that split the lines like random hatchets. Undoubtedly he is hearing poetry, but not any poetry of his era. A skein of sound unreels. He struggles to catch even one familiar word, some root with roots in the epoch of man, but no, but no, it is all delicate gibberish, more mysterious than the things a Finn might say as he murmurs in his sleep. “What is it?” he asks finally, and Ti says, “A book.” Clay nods impatiently, having guessed that: “What book? What are they saying?”
“A poem of the old days, before the moon fell.”
“How old?”
“Before the Breathers. Before the Awaiters. It may be an Interceder poem, but it isn’t in any language the Interceders ever spoke.”
“Can you understand it?”
“Oh, yes,” Ti said. “Yes, of course! How beautiful it is!”
“But what do the words mean?”
“I don’t know.”
He ponders her paradox, and while he does, she takes the cube from him and restores it to its cabinet; it seems to vanish in the inner dusk. Now she gives him an accordion-pleated box made, apparently, of rigid plastic membranes. “A work of history,” she explains. “The annals of a former age, describing the course of human development up to its author’s time.”
“How do I read it?”
“Like this,” she says, and her fingers slide between the membranes, lightly tapping them. The box sets up a low humming noise that resolves itself into discrete packets of verbalization; he bends his head toward it to catch the quanta of knowledge. He hears: “Swallowed crouching metal sweat helmet gigantic blue wheels smaller trees ride eyebrows awed destruction light killed wind and between gently secret in spread growing waiting lived connected over shining risk sleep rings trunks warm think wet seventeen dissolved world size burn.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” he complains. Ti, sobbing, takes the box from him and puts it on a shelf. Going to a closet, she brings forth an arrangement of glossy metal plates, fastened by a punch-rivet in one corner.
“This?”
“Very ancient,” she says. “It isn’t easy for me to make out the title. Yes: here: Mass Transport Planning Techniques in the Ninth Century.” She gives it to him. Ninth century after what, he wonders. The metal plates are covered from edge to edge with tiny engrossed hieroglyphs, which hurl blurts of spectrum at him as he tips the plates now this way, now that, catching shards of light in the minute crevices. The colors, bouncing into his eyes, leave imprinted images. He sees impossible cities of sky-stabbing towers, webbed by mazy bridges far above the ground; in capsules rocketing at implausible velocities across these bridges sit purple-faced caricatures of humanity, lumpy-bodied, heavy-shouldered, with domed heads and feeble eyes. Words accompany the images, but, tilt the plates as he may, he can never quite get the commentary to come straight at him. Signal after signal ricochets from his cheekbone or his forehead and sputters away into some murky corner of the room. After a while he grows weary of this oblique text and returns it to Ti.
Next she offers him three thumb-sized tubes of what seems like diamond or pure quartz, within which a greasy fluid lolls in caverned chambers. He shakes the tubes and the fluid, roiling, sends slow pseudopods creeping into this miniature passage and that one. Meanwhile Ti has taken from somewhere a looping golden filament mounted on a thin silvery plaque; she puts her lips to the plaque and cold light surges from the filament. “Hold the tubes against the light,” she instructs him. He does so and the beam, diffracted through the inner labyrinth of the transparent tubes, hammers messages into his brain:
FLOWERS TRIUMPH.
INFINITY CAN ALSO BE DAMP AND MOIST.
BEWARE CHANGE, FOR IT IMMOBILIZES THE SOUL.
THERE IS WINE IN TRUTH.
THE SKULL LAUGHS BENEATH THE SCOWL.
“What is it?” he asks.
“A religious text,” Ti explains. The messages continue to flood his mind with metaphor, and he stands transfixed, trembling, his skin ablaze. In a few moments Ti casually takes the tubes from him and flips them into a closet.
“Show me the rest,” he demands hoarsely. “Show me everything!”
She gives him a black helmet carved from a single chunk of polished stone. It contains, on its inner surface, a host of feathery cilia. He dons it; the cilia sink into his scalp; he finds himself able to detect the motion of atoms and the vibrations of molecules. The universe becomes a mist of dancing colorless dots, glistening in hazy clouds and occasionally emitting brusque bleeps of energy. He trades the helmet for a film of quivering bubble-stuff which, when placed over his eyes, allows him to perceive the structure of the planet in terms of units of distinct density; here are bars of blue light representing a certain mass, here are auburn globes representing another, here are gray rectangles within which screaming electrons are ground too close. Ti deprives him of this and replaces it with a tiny fragile-walled bowl out of which a river of ivory pins begins to pour, spilling across his feet and covering the floor; he cries out and the pins leap back into the bowl. She presents him with an assemblage of singing wires whose ends overlap in unlikely ways, creating a small peephole of crosshatched nothingness. He squints into it and views the murky orange denizens of some star’s heart. Ti’s next toy is a slender yellow spindle marked from tip to tip by finely graved parallel lines: this, she says, is the last key ever manufactured on Earth. “What door does it fit?” he asks, and she smiles apologetically, telling him that the door no longer exists. Then she shows him a coppery disk that holds all the poetry composed in a certain ten-thousand-year period early in the world’s history, but later than his, and she lets him briefly grasp the sticky handles of a machine whose function is to turn lakes into mountains and mountains into clouds, and then she touches a knobby wand to his forehead, allowing him to discover that this chamber is not the only repository of ancient artifac
Her smile is sad. “Perhaps another time,” she says. “We must leave now.”
He is reluctant to go. Breaking from his stasis, he kneels to peer into cabinets and to draw things from shelves. He is inflamed by this treasury of lost millennia. What is this? And this? And this? How does this intricate and dazzling machine work? What are these sly and enthralling sounds? What truths lie embedded in this block of sparkling glass? And in this nest of rods? This cluster of orbs? He will load his arms with wonders. He will carry forth from the cave enough mystery and enough magic to occupy him for a dozen cycles of investigation. “Come,” Ti says, looking annoyed. “You mustn’t demand too much. This hasn’t been easy.” He shakes her off. “Wait. What’s the hurry? Let me—”
A slab of marble engraved with almost-recognizable symbols clouds and blurs in his hands. The room loses its symmetry of form as the roof first slants, then melts and drips at one corner. The shelves grow misty. Delicate, intricate objects, as clean and sharp as if they had been fashioned only the day before, lose their precision of form. All is in flux. “Come,” Ti whispers. “Come out, now. We’ve stayed too long.”
The floor heaves. The walls grumble.
He flees with Ti. The thought that some convulsion of the planet will destroy these miracles, just as he has found them, drives ninety metal spikes through his throat. Scrambling, sliding, they emerge in the open. Dusk has come. Rubbery-winged birds swoop and screech. He looks back, terrified. No passageway is in sight. Clutching Ti’s arm, he cries, “What’s happening? Will everything be lost?”
“Everything was lost long ago,” Ti says.
He does not understand, but he cannot make her explain. He follows her down the slope, into the plain where the transparent fronds wave; here, in the night, they take on a dazzling glow, filling the air with buzzing brightness. Hanmer, Ninameen, Angelon, and Bril lie where they had been before, and stir as if rising from a long sleep. They stretch, they blink, they seem to yawn. Serifice is not there, and Clay realizes that he had totally forgotten her death during his interlude among the artifacts. He tumbles down beside the Skimmers. Still blazing with that vision of antiquity recaptured, he says hoarsely, “Such things I saw! Such marvels!”
“You stayed too long,” Hanmer says, a trace of regret in his voice.
“How could I leave? How could I tear myself away?”
“Of course. Of course. We understand perfectly. You’re not to blame. Yet it was something of a strain for us, toward the end.”
“What was?”
Hanmer gives him a mild smile instead of an answer. The Skimmers get to their feet. Each of them carefully plucks a glowing frond; the fronds make little clucking sounds as they come, roots and all, from the soil. Clay senses that they are not being killed, only borrowed a while. Hanmer picks an extra one and gives it to Clay. Single file, the Skimmers march off into the night, each carrying its frond aloft like a torch. All but Hanmer have assumed the female form. Clay is third in the procession, with Ti just in front of him and Ninameen behind him. She comes up close and brazenly rubs the tips of her breasts against his bare back by way of greeting: chilly gongs clanging in his spine. “Do you feel better?” she asks. “We were so unhappy for you. The way you were when Serifice went.”
“The longer I’m here, the less I comprehend.”
“Did you like the things Ti showed you?”
“Wondrous. Wondrous. If I could only have stayed longer—if I could just have taken a few of them out with me—”
“Oh, no. You couldn’t.”
“Why?”
Ninameen hesitates a moment. “We dreamed them for you,” she says finally. “Bril, Hanmer, Angelon, me. Our dream. To make you happy again.”
“A dream? Only a dream?”
“And dreams end,” says Ninameen.
9
A furry mist engulfs them; the undulating fronds give a thick pink light now. Briefly it rains. Far away, perhaps high on some unseen but lofty mountain, some female creature begins to sob, and sends the sound of it floating over them, a series of disturbing maroon wails. “What is that?” he asks Hanmer, who says, “It is Wrong, weeping in the hills.”
“Wrong?”
“Wrong. One of the powers whom we propitiate.”
“You have gods?”
“We have those who are larger than ourselves. Such as Wrong.”
“Why does she weep?”
“Perhaps for joy,” Hanmer suggests vaguely.
The sound of Wrong’s sobbing dies away as they plod onward. The light rain ends and a muggy warmth descends, but Clay, soaked, shivers nonetheless. He starts to feel fatigue for the first time since his awakening. It is an odd metaphysical kind of weariness whose nature puzzles him. He has not eaten or slept at all in this era, yet he is neither hungry nor drowsy; and, though he has walked a great many miles, his muscles are not sore. But there is now a new heaviness in his bones, as if they are turning to steel in the marrow, and his head is a burden for his spine, and his organs droop and sag against the walls of flesh that contain them. Eventually it strikes him that what he is feeling is a quality of his surroundings rather than of himself: an emanation, a kind of radioactivity, oozing from the rocks and bleeding out of the soil. Turning to Ninameen, he says, “I’m getting tired. Are you?”
“Naturally. It happens here.”
“Why?”
“This is the oldest part of the world. Age lies piled in clouds all about us. We can’t help breathing it as we go through, and it dulls us.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer to soar over it?”
“It can’t harm us. A passing discomfort.”
“What is this place called?”
“Old,” Ninameen tells him.
Old it is. His body thickens. His skin puckers. He sprouts a coat of coarse white hair on chest and belly and loins. His genitals shrivel. His ankles complain. His veins bulge. His eyes grow bleary. His breath comes short. His back is stooped. His knees are bent. His heart races and slows. His nostrils wheeze. He tries not to breathe, fearing that he is inhaling age like some poisonous fumes, but dizziness overwhelms him after just a moment, and he is forced to gulp in the murky air. The same thing is happening to his companions; the sleek waxen skin of the Skimmers now is cracked and wrinkled, their fluid stride is silly shuffle, their eyes are dull. The breasts of those in female form have become ugly dugs, flat and pendulous, with blackened, eroded nipples. Their mouths hang open, revealing gray toothless gums. He is troubled by these changes in them; for, if they are ageless and imperishable, should they be altering even now as they pass through the valleys of Old? Or are they tactfully corrupting their flesh for his benefit, so that he will not feel ashamed of his own det
He struggles forward. Silently he begs them to grant him a reprieve from this place. How easy it would be, he thinks, for them to summon their pale spark-shot clouds and spring up from this dismal slough in lovely flight! But they insist on walking. He moves ever more slowly. The gleaming frond that lights his way has caught the contagion of senescence; it buckles and bends, and its glow is stale. Their path is ascending, making the going all the more difficult. His throat is dry and his tongue, swollen, is a lump of old cloth in his mouth. Gummy rheum drips from the rims of his eyes and trickles across his chest. He is reminded of the goat-men, scaly and hideous, covered with scums.
Animals cackle in the underbrush. The frond’s faint light shows him toothy mouths yawning at the base of every tree beside the path. Dark-blooming flowers exhale an odor of digestive fluid. There is a drumming in his temples; there is a coldness in his gut. Twice he falls, and twice he scratches himself to his feet unhelped. Old. Old. Old. The universe itself is dying; the suns have gone out, the molecules lie in quiet heaps in the void, entropy has won its long war. How much longer? How much farther? He can no longer bear the sight of his own wizened body, and, quivering, he tosses his frond away, glad to be rid of illumination. But Bril, recovering it, puts it back in his hand and says, “You should not condemn it to root itself in such a place.” And Clay’s soul fills with pity and shame, and he keeps his grip on the frond, while trying now to look neither at himself nor at the others.
All colors have washed away. He sees everything in shades of black, even the frond’s glow. His bones bend with every step. The coils of his intestines are patched and flaky. His lungs are shredding. With a fierce effort he drives himself forward to Hanmer—parched, withered—and mutters, “We’ll die here! Can’t we get out faster?”