Bradbury, Ray - Chapbook 13 (3 page)

"
i
fly!"
gasped
Aljmed
.

''
Yestermorrow
!
''
Yestermorrow
!?''

"That which once
was
and that
which will
be
¹
.
Locked in your heart, remembrances of lost
time.
Ghosts buried in the
past. Ghosts buried
to be awakened, in the future."

"In what year?" cried Ahmed, upside
down.

"Any year; there are no such things as
years.
Men
made up the names of years to keep track.
Ask not the year."

"What day, then, and what hour?"
Ahmed
felt
the words spun from his mouth.

"Clocks are machines that pretend at
Time.
There is only the
rising and the setting of the sun.
There are
no such things as weeks and months and hours. Say only that we move in
space."

"Toward what once
was?
Toward what one
day will
be?"

"Clever boy.
That is all that Time
truly is.
The
past we try to recall, or the future which
is just as impossible and unseen!"

"We move both ways, then?"

"Truly, that is our motion.
Witness!"
And Ahmed looked down and saw:
A vast sea of sand
which lay shore upon shore
upon shore, surfing itself, falling to lay itself out in
shuffles of white, flourishes of stone and rock
and pebble that had gone through the
granary
of
the sea a million years ago, before the sea
pulled back to leave this endless desert and
men
to
stake their tents and drive their camels and
raise the walls of cities. But now it
was all
stillness,
a great blanket of silent dunes from
which, here or there, soft
liftings
of sandbanks
appeared as if, beneath the surface, the limbs and torsos of buried gods
were hid. And here and there, half seen, the covered, the masked
face of an ancient
worshipper of the turning
stars and the passing wind and the unseen years
sifting like the
merest veil of sandstorm, here a
nose about to break through, there a chin wait
ing to tremble, a
mouth to speak, though
choked with dust. And beneath yet another
dune, a blunt
forehead, a brow lost in its own
past, gone lunatic with silence.

Beneath
 
the
surface . . . buried Gods were hid.

"Oh," gasped Ahmed, flailing his
arms in
panic
to swim the air, "what is buried here? A
city long dead or a city as yet
unbirthed
, waiting
to be born?"

"Both!"

"How can that be?" Ahmed sank, then
rose, exclaiming, "How
so?"

"One is lost memory. The second is remem
bered forward beyond
tomorrow. We call that
'dream.' To recall rebuilds the past. To imagine builds
the future. One city fits within the other.
Life sits in death. Our futures rise from the
grave.
Two cities.
One unreal because it has
vanished.
The
other unreal because it rests in
that living
grave between a sleeper's ears.
The
past exists because it once was real.
The future
exists because we
need
it to be real. Look upon
this phantom scene.
Tell me, what is lost, what
is yet to be found? What left behind, what far
ahead? Are they not
twins? Is not the future a
mirror reflecting the past, aching to be born?
Be silent.
Witness.
Then speak!"

Ahmed hovered and stared, stared and
blinked, scanned this
wasteland lit by sunrise a
thousand years past or sunset in a calendar as
yet unprinted. And
then he said:

"I feel . . . many men, many women lost
under the sand,
coming and going with their
sons and daughters. I feel great stones. Is this a
graveyard, then, with
catacombs and tombs
along this dry sea? Catacombs, tombs, mum
mies, death!"
shouted Ahmed, wrapped in ice,
drowning in cold winds.
"Death!"

"No!" cried
Gonn
,
reaching out to seize the
boy.
"Cellars.
Library
cellars to be filled with
thoughts, fancies, impossible futures brought
to life!"

"Death!"
Ahmed cried, and
then, looking to
the far countries of sand where untouchable
beasts walked away
and away from him,
"Father!"

"Do not cry out to fathers," said
Gonn
. "Cry
out to yourself to be saved."

"Death!"
And Ahmed, in one
mournful
cry,
fell.

And as he fell, swift, diminished, exhaled,
punctured like a vast
aerial balloon, so fell
Gonn
, moaning, into the dunes. Where he
struck like a mighty
meteor, only a crater of
dust showed his ruin, even as Ahmed, similarly
fallen, did not sink
to dust but sprawled,
stunned, to pick himself up under an empty sky
and an empty
procession of moonlit dunes.

"
Gonn
!"
he said.

No answer.

"
Gonn
!"
he bleated.

Silence.

The merest suction of sand dimpled in, mur
muring, near his
cheek.

"See," said a hollow whisper.
"What?" said
the lost
voice.
"You
..."
More sand sank upon
itself. ". . .
have
done?" Fading: "I die. You . . .
have . . . killed . .
. me."

"No!" Ahmed clutched at the
funneling hole
in the dune. "Come back,
Gonn
. I need
you!"

"No
..."
came the voice beneath the sand,
"not me
..."

Ahmed dug frantically and groped and dug
only sand and air.

"
Gonn
.
Where are you?
Rise."

"Your father weighs me down."

"He can't. He mustn't!"

"He is your past. You must be your
future.
Put
him away. Remove him from my limbs, my
heart,
my
head!"

"How,
how??!!"
Ahmed dug deeper to noth
ing and more nothing.

"Avert your gaze. Look not to horizons
with
blood
of your heart and beasts that stay fas
tened to the earth. Dance upon my
grave."

"What?"

"Dance.
No more tears or I am
flooded as
well as brought to slaughter. I am almost
gone.
Dance."

And wiping his eyes and looking not at the
horizon where his
to-be-forgotten father lived,
Ahmed danced.

And beneath the cold dune long after
mid
night
he felt a stir, a mighty commotion as if a
god's heart had
started up.

'Dance
upon my
grave.''