Bradbury, Ray - Chapbook 13 (4 page)

And he danced more.

"Sing
..."
said the mighty whisper.

And Ahmed not only danced to kick away
the dust, but sang as
if from the highest minaret in a great land, and the large heart hidden grew
larger and banged
itself to life.

And if for an instant Ahmed lifted his gaze
to search the land,
prepared to cry out, then
the huge heart slackened and the sand froze, so that he
fixed his gaze only on his feet, which
moved and leaped and pummeled the hidden
heart as he shouted
wild words of love to ex
hume, to revive, to prolong, to rouse.

"
YesV
came the
mighty whisper, the buried
voice
. "
Ah, yes, son of my
heart and life, he who dances to waken fire and know no limits
to the sky or earth.
Dance, sing, dance, there!"

And with this last explosion, the sands were
riven
and, like a mountain,
a storm, a celebra
tory rocket,
Gonn
was
rebirthed
,
soared, and
lifted Ahmed with him.

Among
   
the
   
clouds,
   
both
   
laughed
   
and
Ahmed's
tears were tears of relief and joy, and
so accepted, as
Gonn
hurled
questions:

"Does the caravan exist?"

"No," said Ahmed.

"Do you see it anywhere?"

"No," replied Ahmed.

"And the men of that long
march
?"

"Are gone," Ahmed responded.

"And someone's father with them?"

"And that father with them."

"Which means this present cannot blind
you
to
the future? Good," said this great mouth in
this great head on this great body.
"See
morel
Be
a proper gravedigger. Let your soul instruct
your heart, let your
heart speak to your tongue.
Exhale. Celebrate. Shout!"

Ahmed inhaled deeply of the high sweet
clear-water air.

"Let go!" said the huge mouth,
almost en
gulfing
him.

Ahmed exploded out all of that incredible
air.

And the dry sea below, the ocean tide of
shore on shore of
dunes shouldering dunes,
shivered.

" Again
!"

Ahmed exhaled.

And the sand swarmed up like locust flights.

And what lay beneath was revealed.

"Great
Gonn
."
Ahmed was panicked into de
light. "Have I
done
this?"

"All this has Ahmed done."

And below were not cities buried stone on
stone, but marble
cliffs from which one day
those towns would be built, and atop the cliffs
were blood, bone, and
webbed creatures that
flung themselves out to kite-sail like scythes to
cut the wind; grinning
reptiles with oiled, unsa
vory smiles.

"How terrible!"
Ahmed flinched and raised his
hands to shield his face. "What made
them?"

"Why, the One God whose nightmare gave
them birth."

"How are they called?"

"Don't call, they might
come.
Nameless
they were for a million beast generations, until on
museum walls they were
given names. But
these bony kites were shut like fans long before
you woke in the womb.
Their
wingprint
smiles
are fixed in stone below the cliffs.
No ape or
man
ever witnessed their flight. Only their hi
eroglyph smiles remain. Quick!"

And
Gonn
and Ahmed
fled upward in a
mid
night
explosion of bats fired from caves, flung out
to feed on winds of locust and moth and
mosquito.

And the sky was empty now as trees arose
and batwing squirrels
capered across the moon.

"Flight," whispered
Gonn
. "And flight again.
High journeys to
drive men mad with envy
when at last man came.
Flight."

"Flight," said Ahmed.

And then the mighty friend to Ahmed ex
haled, as did the boy,
and more sand sifted
away on a shoreline as vast as the eternal sky
to reveal streets and
towns and people fixed like
statues there, stranded as the dry sea
vanished
and they all
looked to the cliffs where once the
dread kites soared, but now as the sun rose in
the midst of darkness a man and his
son,
clothed in golden
feathers embedded in bright
wax, stood
atiptoe
on the cliff's rim.
"Higher," cried Ahmed,
"I must
see!"
And
Gonn
-Ben-Allah spun higher to see the
man and his son with golden wings
leap, thrust,
fly
off the
cliff, with the son mounting higher
and higher as the old man, alarmed, tried to
shout him down. But the
noon
sun fired his
wings to melt the wax to golden tears which
dripped from wrist,
elbow, and arm. And he
fell like a stone from the sky.

"Catch him!" Ahmed exclaimed.
"I cannot."

"You are a god who can do
anything."
"And he is a mortal who must
try everything."
And the flier with
golden wings struck the
sea and sank in bright rings, and the sea was
silent as the sun
died and the moon returned.

"How
terrible!"
Ahmed exclaimed.

"Oh, how brave," said
Gonn
.

They circled to see the father hover to mourn
above
the quiet surf.

"Did," said Ahmed, "all this truly
happen?
It
must be so."

"Then it is so."

"Though his wings melted and he
fell?"

"Even so.
There is never
failure in trying.
Not
to try is the
greater
death."

"But what does it
mean?"

"It means," said
Gonn
-Ben-Allah, "that you
must
toss feathers in
the wind and guess their
directions to all points of the heart's compass.
It means you must jump
off cliffs and build
your wings on the way down!"

"And
fall?
And never fear?"

"Fear, yes, but brave beyond fear."

"That is a big thing for a boy."

"Grow with its bigness, let it burst your
skin
to
let forth—
lol
—the butterfly. Quick!"

And they raced the
windstream
over the
earth
and beheld:

An airship made up of thistles, pollen, milk
weed, a craft so light
it trembled at a child's
breath. Its masts and spars were immense reeds
that bent with the
weight of ghost dandelions.
The sails were cobweb and swamp-mist and its
ship's captain a
weightless mummy of tobacco
weed and autumn leaf that rustled even as the
sails above him shuffled
the storm wind.
An
acre of
ship with an ounce of cargo.
Sneezel
Ahmed did! And it
vanished in flakes.

As they raced the
windstream
again to find:

A balloon as ripe as a peach and as tall as
ten
acrobats,
filled with hot wind from a basket of
fire slung beneath its gulping mouth,
inhaling
flame,
ascending with its passengers—a rooster,
and a dog barking at the moon, and two men
waving at an audience
sea below.

And a woman in a strange dress and bonnet,
laughing in the clouds
as her balloon caught fire
and fell, shrieking.

"No!" cried Ahmed.

"
Refuse
 
no
  
sight.
  
People
 
fall
 
but
 
to
  
rise
again!" whispered the Great God of
Time and
Storms.
"Open your eyes!"

Ahmed blinked and saw the curve of earth
where a kite was flung
up in a cloud stream. In
a vast bamboo frame with silk banners, like a spider
caught in its bright web, a man struggled
to tilt the kite. Ambling over and down with
the tidal winds, he
soared up like a wild excla
mation point.

"1 fly," he cried, "I
fly!"

And knew the joy of
being high above a
world of night.

But hearing his high laughter at conquering
hills of cloud and
storm, a hundred men did
mutter in their sleep, and shout confusions to
deny his high
trajectory. Hid from his upward
truth, slammed their eyes shut, erased his
flight,
as
if it never were, and with empty guns and empty minds fired the sky.

Even as a blizzard of arrows rose to pierce
his triumph of paper
and silk, the Chinese em
peror's symbol on each dart. The soaring man
was
struck, pinned to a cloud, as his last shout
"I fly" became "die, I die," and fell
as if lightning had torn his silks. Where he had been was
air and emptiness.

He was gone as if he had never been. Gun
shot by men who
refused his sight, destroyed
by doubt and envy, the flier had let go his joy,
let loose the wings
from remembered birds,
and fallen.

And suddenly, as if pinned against the sky
himself, Ahmed shook
like a paper toy.

Gonn
-Ben-Allah said,
"Have you no words?"

"No words for what I have seen,"
mourned
the
boy.
"Oh, mighty one, how I wish for one
glimpse of my father and my camel."

"Patience.
You must be strong
without that
medicine and so survive to give me birth.
..."

Ahmed was astonished. "But you are
already
born
¹
.
I speak to you. You are
real."

"Only the promise
of the real, the possibility
of birth."

"But I speak, you
answer!"

"Do you not talk in your sleep?"

"Yes, but—"

"Well, then. Without
you,
I will
never be
truly
born. Without
me,
you will be the walking
dead. Are you strong enough to birth a
god?"

"If gods can be
born of boys, then yes.
And
now?"
He gazed up into the
immense bronze face of the half-dreamt deity. "What?"

"This!" cried
Gonn
-Ben-Allah.

And below, along the endless seacoast of
dead sand, a volcano
of buildings erupted.

"What are
those?"
Ahmed
wondered.

"Men who flew in stone, marble, and clay,
who
dreamed wings but settled for arches and
beams, palaces and pyramids, each mightier
than the last,
destined to fly in place, then fall
to dust. Because they could not stretch high,
loom free, they chose
the lower road, which,
still seen, made their hearts grow wings in their
breasts and made their
blood rise heavenward
with that strange sound joy makes, laughing to
see such buildings as
opened their windows to set their souls free.

"But that was not true flight, for their
feet
were
caught in clay. Even on those towers,
where wings might soar, all hope died and men
sank back
to dreaming.

"So behold a pyramid here, a Great Wall
be
yond.
Perches from which boys, grown men,
might leap to die, hoping for wings."

And the winds blew and the sands recovered
the cities and Ahmed
and
Gonn
sailed on.

To see men who wove carpets and hurled
them with shouts:
"Rise!" But the carpets
floundered and fell.

And saw a collector of butterflies sew up a
thousand small bright wings, a bloom of spring
flight which, as he stepped from his
roof, ex
ploded
at his first shout of joy and last shout
of silence.

And saw a thousand umbrellas fall as Earth's
gravity flattened a
mad boy in summer grass.

And saw yet other machines, all fans and
whirligigs and
hummingbird
flickerings
, driven
before the rain,
dissolved into a mindless sea.

"I see!" Ahmed exclaimed.

"See more. From all you have found this
night, call forth
each foundling
toyl
Fill the sky,
then
burn their shadows
in your head, so as
never to be lost.
Now!"

"Yes!" Ahmed spun to shout:
"All you
ghosts of Forever, rise! Who
says?"

"Ahmed," whispered
Gonn
.

"Ahmed!" echoed the boy.

"Of the Oblivion
Machines."

Ahmed hesitated, then: "Of the Oblivion
Machines!"

And where before had been a hundred, now
ten thousand wasp,
dragonfly, reptile shapes
flicker-lit the moon. And all about was a sound
on sound of rivers,
then Amazons, then mighty
oceans
of wings.

And Ahmed slapped his hand and all the
heavens were
thunderclaps of applause with no lightning,
drumshots
of clamor: bone-breaking
eruptions of boys and men, woven skeletons
across the clouds.