The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (15 page)

“Well, what about him?” The Girl pointed at Manuel. “He doesn’t look so bad to me!”
 

“He’s just a Wild Human.”
 

“Well, make me into a Wild Human, then, if you’ve run out of your own type of body.”
 

“Wild Humans are not suitable hosts.” As Zozula spoke to the Girl he gave Manuel a furious look and jerked his head in a gesture of dismissal. Matters were difficult enough without this youth hanging around. “You wouldn’t understand the details.”
 

“Try us,” said Manuel.
 

Now Zozula gave the boy his full attention. “Just who in hell are you?”
 

“Manuel,” said Manuel. There was little else he could say.
 

But the effect of the name on Zozula was surprising. His anger faded, as a curious recollection touched his mind for a moment and was gone. Manuel? “It’s a common enough name,” he said. Then it came to him: a recent dream, and a woman in black saying, “
Zozula, you have been chosen. You, she, and a young man named Manuel will form the Triad. Look after the others, and always remember Shenshi, for I have some vanity, too
.”
 

He regarded the boy in sudden interest. “Why did you come here?”
 

“Perhaps to learn,” said Manuel. “Look!” He pointed suddenly upward, so imperiously that they followed his gaze...
 

The slow curvature of the Dome was visible as a black mass against the deepening gloom of the coming night, and the stars were appearing around its rim. The Dome was huge, pressing down on them, with no clouds to conceal its immensity. No lights showed; the dust of aeons had blanketed the ports. Yet something was happening up there, far away in the sky near the horizon of the black arc. Just for an instant a faint halo glowed. Then there was a flash that was more than simple light...
 

And the three of them, down beside the axolotl pool, saw in their minds something that their eyes couldn’t possibly have registered. The Girl gasped and Manuel smiled, and Zozula grappled to retain the image of flashing steel and whirling wheels with heavy spokes, pumping rods and a core of great heat, and two men... Then it was gone, and they were left with only the power of it.
 

“The worst thing...” the Girl said softly, “the thing you do when there is nothing else to keep your humanity alive. Some of us call it the Celestial Steam Locomotive. You ride it when you’ve tried everything else.”
 

“Will you explain it, please?” Manuel asked Zozula.
 

Zozula looked at him for a long time, and in the end saw something that satisfied him. Slowly, knowing very well he was offering an excuse and not an explanation, he spoke.
 

“A long time ago Mankind reached the stage where only a select few people could understand enough to keep up with technological advances. And as time went by, fewer still built upon the work of those few, and then just a handful, the most brilliant minds on Earth. Then maybe a couple, dreaming incredible dreams, directing work that only the Rainbow could understand. They built on the work of generations of others, and they died. That was the end of it. Humanity was surrounded by machines that ran themselves—though
how,
and what some of them
did,
nobody knows. Other machines helped them. Maybe the Rainbow knows all the answers. But we don’t even know what questions to ask, or how to ask them. So I’m not ashamed of admitting that I can’t explain the existence of the Celestial Steam Locomotive. I have to put up a front, though. It can be terrifying for the Keepers when their own leader admits he doesn’t know what’s going on...”
 

The Girl said, “I’ve always known exactly what was going on, because I made it happen, more or less. So this is the real world? Well, I don’t like it. Take me back to my own world, please.”
 

“Let me show you something,” said Manuel once again, and he activated the Simulator.
 

“Just another machine.” Zozula watched the lights begin to glow. “I’ve seen these before.”
 

The images began to form before the Simulator, brighter than usual, because of the darkness around. A pale mist, glowing on the faces of the watchers and plating the axolotl pool with silver. The little water dolls, disturbed, rose to the surface and watched, too.
 

“The storm, you see...” The clouds were there, building up, and below them the tossing waves; and below that again, huge and graceful shapes that puzzled Manuel because he hadn’t put them in the picture himself. Were these shapes some residue of Belinda herself? Something from her mind that had slipped into the picture while he was composing it? They swam in formation, the whales, and there was something organized and purposeful about their movements. Then they were gone and the clouds were suggesting the flying hair of a girl swimming, dancing underwater. Manuel had composed all this. He remembered. He was trembling and his palms were moist.
 

“Remarkable...” Zozula was leaning forward.
 

The Girl was silent. She’d never seen anything like this before. She’d never imagined such a thing as abstract art could exist. Where she came from, people were practical. They wanted something? They got it. They were bored with something? They threw it away. Art? It had no place in the relentless pursuit of pleasure. It was too slow, too introspective, too passive. Yet this performance by the barrel-shaped boy’s machine was oddly fascinating. In some way it made her think of a childhood she’d never had.
 

Manuel said apologetically, “I was told it didn’t have enough love. But I think it has more, now.”
 

Zozula said quietly, “It has love.” It seemed Eulalie was very close to him again.
 

And now Belinda was there, dancing before the little group, dancing in the dark like a glowing naiad—not like a girl would dance in the flesh, so you could see her elbows and her knees and her pores, but dancing in the minds of the watchers. An axolotl would not have recognized any human figure in those images, but the humans did. For them, the clouds spelled
love.
 

The Girl was crying, sobbing quietly as she watched, blinking because she didn’t want to miss anything.
 

The mists, deepening their rainbow colors, gave one final message of hope and courage and loss, and faded away. Manuel switched the machine off.
 

Zozula was talking softly, almost to himself. “... but there is no hope, is there? The Dome is dying. Everything’s dying, slowly. What’s the use of love, now? Love died early in the game.” His gaze was turned inward and he’d forgotten he was a Cuidador in the presence of two lesser mortals. Then he blinked and looked at Manuel—and now he saw him. Something passed between them. He said, “Forgive me, boy. My wife just died.”
 

Manuel said, “I’m sorry. I just lost somebody too.”
 

After a pause, Zozula asked, “The storm-girl?”
 

“Yes.”
 

And because Zozula and the Girl seemed receptive, Manuel told them the story of Belinda.
 

Afterward Zozula said, “I kept almost seeing her in your mind-painting, and then she was gone again. Why couldn’t you have made her a little more clear?”
 

“I know how she looks. I’ll never forget that. I wanted to show how she made me feel.”
 

“Was she a Wild Human?”
 

“She was not from the village. Neither was she from the Dome. She never told me where she came from. I was afraid to ask too many questions, because...” He hesitated. “I don’t like being laughed at.”
 

“We won’t laugh. Go on.”
 

“I didn’t want to pin her down. She never seemed quite real. I think I was frightened that if I really tried to identify her, I’d find she didn’t exist. She was full of life at first, and she made me laugh a lot. She only had a few rags of clothes, and they were mostly skins. Later she became quiet and she seemed to get very weak. She was very thin and breathless...”
 

“Thin? Like me, you mean?”
 

Manuel laughed. “She was much prettier than you, Zozula.”
 

For a while now, an excitement had been growing in Zozula that he could barely suppress. Now he speculated aloud. “A slim human, breathless in an atmosphere that a Wild Human can easily withstand... Where could she come from? Is there really some kind of city in the delta jungle? She could have drifted down the coast from there, in a boat. They’re out there somewhere, the True Humans. They must be.”
 

“I’m tired,” the Girl said suddenly. “Can we go back now?”
 

Zozula said, “We’re not going back to the way we were. Not yet. There are more important things on Earth than creating special effects for a lot of selfish zombies. I’ve lived all my life in and around this Dome, did you know that? And suddenly I’m beginning to realize I haven’t been doing my job properly. I’ve visited the village twice and communicated with people in other Domes. But I have to admit that I know nothing about the world. That’s a sobering admission for a man who’s been top god for longer than I care to remember. So now, I’d like to find out what’s going on out here. I’m going to ask some very small questions. Ones that I’ll understand the answers to. Then maybe I’ll be worthy of my job and able to solve some of the problems we have in there.”
 

“Take me back first,” said the Girl anxiously.
 

“No. You’re coming along. There’s hope for you, Girl—you were crying at Manuel’s pictures. You come with me, and perhaps we’ll find you a proper body.”
 

Manuel picked up the Simulator.
 

“And you too, Manuel. The three of us—we each have something I haven’t seen in anyone for a long time, except for my wife—she had it. But maybe we’re the only three left. Let’s stick together for a while.”
 

So that was it. Nothing dramatic, no thunderbolts from Starquin, no sudden materialization of Dedos, no mysterious writings on rocks. This account of the formation of the Triad may not be as dramatic, as flamboyant as some, but it has the ring of truth.
Let’s stick together for a while.
Very probable words, when spoken by a man who needs company and love, when spoken to two young people who have demonstrated that they can help fill his need.
 

Our Tale Continues with
 

the Group Of Stories and
 

Legends Known as In the
 

Land of Lost Dreams
 

where the Triad meets many strange creatures
 

and, in so doing
 

learn their own faults,
 

return to the real world
 

and prepare to meet their destiny
 

There was a river that flowed from the mountains behind Pu’este to the cool waters of the old South Atlantic. It is gone now. The jungle has turned to desert and the drifting sand has obliterated the watercourse, but in the 143rd millennium it carried green glacial run-off through the hills, passing several kilometers north of the stupendous structure of Dome Azul, through the coastal rain forest to a flat delta. Here in this delta lived the greatest and smallest civilization that Earth has ever known.
 

Their minarets rose from the ground into the clouds. Their machines hummed quietly in vast underground chambers. Their vehicles glided without wheels, without sound, along broad avenues lined with trees that grew nowhere else on Earth—indeed, nowhere else in the whole of the Greataway. They sent their ships around the Galaxy and they saw creatures that no man or alien had ever seen before.
 

They were sterile.
 

Consequently, they poured into their art everything that another race might have poured into procreation. Their paintings were breathtaking, their songs would make people weep. Their statuary was dancing stone, and their poems spoke of emotions that ordinary humans had never known but that to these people were as real as the trees and the crocodiles.
 

And all this within a delta island no more than a kilometer across. No human outside the delta ever saw this wonderful civilization, except for a brief glimpse afforded to a Cuidador named Zozula, by way of the Rainbow. And when it died, it left no remains other than a whisper that became a legend.
 

The river flowed swiftly on two sides of the triangular island; on the third side lay the ocean. The river water was cold. This, and the crocodiles, discouraged the people from leaving the island, where they grew a few simple crops and fished when the mood took them, meanwhile creating, creating. The river flowed brown for most of the year, having picked up silt and broken vegetation during its journey through the rain forest.
 

But once a year it flowed clear and green, and carried to the delta a flotilla of tiny boats carved from balsa: model galleons, frigates and dhows.
 

And in each boat lay a human baby, crying and waving tiny fists at the sky.
 

Hopho soared in the clouds. He had linked the minds of Antilla and Buth, Lergs and Stril, and added a couple of ideas from Sintel, and fashioned the whole into an intricate composite that would solve all the mysteries of the world—once he had found the means to turn that last key...